


All the Strangers Came Today

by Erisden



Category: Legion (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Future, Anxiety, Astral Projection, But no actual rape it's just discussion, DID Alters, DID System, Diagnosis but without naming it, Dissociation, Dissociative Amnesia, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Episode Related, F/M, Fighting, Fingering, Healing, Hearing Voices, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Memory Loss, Mental Coercion, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Mentions of Rape, Mind Control, Multiple Personalities, Mutant Powers, Partial Integration, Pegging, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Violence, Psychological issues, Sex Toys, Telekinesis, Telepathic Sex, Telepathy, Violence, rape mention, support system
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 05:21:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 58,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18866566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erisden/pseuds/Erisden
Summary: After an attempt to visit his doomed future goes wrong, David finds himself trapped, without Switch to bring him back to where he belongs. He soon realises his situation is much worse than he thought, with his future self running rampant and most of the world reduced to nothing more than ashes.Without a time traveller to help him return, and with his own timeline inaccessible, David must find the guidance he needs to get him back home.What he stumbles upon is far more than what he bargained for.





	1. Looks As Though They're Here to Stay

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Hexiva and ASummerBreeze for reading through this WHOLE thing, and for the beta!
> 
> David arrives in the future and meets his future self.

It took David a few seconds to completely manifest, his stomach lurching, his mind ringing, and nausea sitting like a rock in his throat. As he had expected, travelling through time was not an easy task, nor was it pleasant.

As he regained his wits, he assessed his surroundings. Everything felt... grey. Not in colour, but in the sensation that assaulted his skin and made his throat burn at every breath, as though something had infiltrated his brain and turned the perception dial - his mind’s opacity dial - down to halfway, into something milky and distorted and dull. Nothing stirred among the abandoned remains of the buildings around him. The very air around him felt stifling, and when David raised a hand up to his throat, he felt it push back against him, like firm jello, forcing his movements to slow unnaturally.

Around him stood the remains of buildings. Some still stood tall, several dozens of stories above him, with chunks of the sides missing from them. A quick glance around told David these chunks had been ripped out and hurled hundreds of feet away, given the scattered pieces of buildings all around him. Power lines had been uprooted right along with them. Poles lined the streets, cables littered at their sides, forcibly snapped broken. The sidewalk that he stood on sported cracks not only between the tiles, but in the middle: giant splits that gaped up at the sky, in some last ditch attempt to take one last breath. Pieces of concrete, too, were missing, sprinkled around the streets and yellowed grass.

And then, as though his body had finally loaded into this future, he felt a click deep in his bones and energy pulse through his muscles. The feeling lasted but a moment before subsiding as quickly as it had come. He lifted his hand and stretched his fingers, and found that his movements had finally caught up to the rest of his body; he didn’t feel like he was moving through a bowl of jello anymore. The world itself was eerily still around him, as though frozen in time. But he felt the emptiness like the hole of a bullet through his mind.

Someone was missing.

“Switch?”

She had been right in front of David just seconds before. In his time, not in this time. Where he was now - or, more accurately, _when_ he was now - wasn’t just a few seconds later. In all honesty, David didn’t know just how far ahead in the future this was. Right now could be days later, or weeks later, or _years_ later. All he knew was, he didn’t know how to time travel. Switch did. And Switch had been the one to bring them here, on the swear that she would be right by his side here.

So why wasn’t she here?

He called out again. “Switch?” His voice sounded loud here, in this silent, unmoving world.

Still, no answer.

The hair on the back of his neck stood. He didn’t want to call out again, in case he disturbed something that shouldn’t be disturbed. An uneasy feeling lingered right between his shoulder blades, where he couldn’t reach. Something was here, in this dead and stagnant planet, and if he wasn’t careful, he would wake it up. And that would be the end of him.

He shut his eyes and took a deep breath. He was psychic. He was a psychic, a _telepath._ Nothing stopped him from searching for her. Maybe they had gotten separated in the transition, and she was somewhere else. Gathering every bit of concentration he could, he sent his mind out, stretching it across the broken city, through thick walls and fallen tables and choking air. One mile, two miles, five miles, ten miles, out through empty cornfields and barren woods and naked trees... until the pain began to build. His power was like a balloon: it extended outwards easily from him - the centre - and engulfed everything within its radius, but the father it spread, the more strain it put on him. When he had first begun to train his mind, back at Summerland, he had only managed half a mile before the pressure got to him. That was before he had learned control. Now, on his own, with nothing stopping him, he could unfurl to a hundred miles: more than that, on a good day.

At ninety-two, he reached his limit. It took him five seconds to feel out the area.

Nothing.

No Switch. No anyone.

He tried again. Still, he found nothing. There were plants, there were a few animals, but there were no humans. No living signs of life anywhere.

He pulled his mind back. This had to be a mistake. There had to be humans living around here somewhere. There had to be _someone_ alive in the nearest hundred miles. And yet, he remember what Future Syd had told him, when he had visited her for the first time on his own volition.

_This thing kills everyone._

David suppressed a shudder. Future him didn’t seem like a very good guy. At all. Whatever had turned him into a killer had shattered him, and he wanted to know exactly what that was.

After all, that was why he had come here.

Right. Switch had to be around _somewhere._ She had to. He _needed_ her to get back.

So he reached out with his mind again. This time, he didn’t aim for distance: he aimed for Switch, for the concept of her, who laid just out of his reach, grasping, clawing, groping for an existence that laid in the paper-thin expands of the astral plane. They had, after all, combined their powers - his astral projection with her time travel - to send him here.

Wrong move.

A sharp bolt of pain burst through David’s mind, from the back of his neck up through his temple. With a sharp cry, he yanked his mind back in, folding it in on itself and throwing a blanket of protection around it. He staggered back, falling back onto a nearby half-bench - the other half was nowhere to be found - and leaning over his thighs. He could think of nothing else but to hold his head until the pain subsided.

 _“Augh…_ shit.” What was _that?_ Nothing he had ever felt before. Nothing he thought he _should_ feel here, considering nothing was alive here. Nothing except himself… and himself.

He lifted his chin, leaning his cheek against his palm. It was all he could do to keep his head up. “Switch?”

No good. She wasn’t there, and his head was in pain, and he could feel panic beginning to bubble through the center of his chest and in the palms of his hands. He couldn’t do this. Not right now.

So he didn’t. He pulled himself up, steeling himself against the nerves that pressed against his chest and the insides of his wrists and the outsides of his fingers. He couldn’t afford to lose track of his concentration, so he took a deep breath. Then another. In, hold, out. In, hold, out again. “It’s just a change in plans,” he said to himself, softly, so as not to disturb the sleeping rubble around him. “Just a change in plans. You can’t predict the future.”

Whoever coined _that_ phrase deserved an award for ‘stupidest phrase ever invented.’

From his landing spot, he began to explore. This was a large city - or it had been, before it was destroyed.

He walked through streets covered in broken glass and fallen lampposts, the bottoms of his feet sliding across gravel that wasn’t supposed to be there. In some piles, he found soot and ashes, as though something had caught fire and vanished.

He knelt beside a heap of rubble. Concrete from an uprooted sidewalk jutted out from the midst of the scattered remains of bricks and mortar dust. David reached out, running his fingers along the jagged edges, and when he pulled them away, they were covered in a thin layer of dust, as though it had been in this state for several years. This was a building, he knew, destroyed by something monstrous. A monster who, he already knew... was him.

“No. Not.” It wasn’t him. It was a _different_ him, in Future Syd’s timeline. His was clean. His didn’t involve killing people and sabotaging the entire world. He was better than this.

He shook his head and went on.

Cars sat, unmoving, in motel and gas station parking lots, their doors open, as though they were waiting for people to return to them. Groceries sat in shopping carts and shovels laid beside sidewalks, hole dug into the ground. As though everyone had simply disappeared in the middle of their daily lives, without a fight or so much as a struggle. He would have believed it, if there were any cars on the road. But the roads were empty. Maybe his future self had wanted to take a joyride down the streets with one of the many ownerless cars and gotten rid of everything in his way.

Buildings rose above him, some with shattered windows and some with windows still fully intact. Not many of the walls were damaged, but the ones that were seemed clearly to have been hit by flying debris that chipped the paint and bricks and left portions of wall missing. As he walked, he glanced into the windows, pausing every so often whenever he thought he saw a movement in them. Then the moment would pass, and he would spot no movement, and he would continue on.

It took him an hour to walk across the city. By the time he reached the edge and saw the treeline where the forest began, a sense of unease had settled itself in the back of his mind and stayed. It crept down the back of his neck and into his spine and lingered across the tops of his arms, bringing painful gooseflesh to the surface. He didn’t like atmosphere. It felt like someone was watching him, but he couldn’t detect anyone around. Obviously, nobody was watching him.

Not even his future self. David would have detected even him by now if he was.

He looked out into the trees. He wanted Summerland. He wanted its familiarity. He still knew the inside of it, the various doors and windows, the trees and paths that surrounded it. Sometimes, when his dreams decided not to unleash their wrath on his unconscious mind, he dreamed of stacked cots with mattresses and sheets and pillows tucked safely inside; Oliver’s voice sounding softly through the room, that cut to jungle sounds and rain on window sills and crickets chirping softly behind rustling tree branches that blew in nonexistent wind; the soft, blue glow of the showers, just beside the dorm, that would sometimes turn on in the middle of the night when someone wanted to shower. The water had always been gentle on his shoulders.

In his mind’s eye, he could see the dock and the river, its water flowing around the banks and around branches stuck in its shallower, muddier places; the whisper of the wind against his ears, brushing lightly through the fabric of his shirt. A place he had always gone when he needed to be alone to calm down after the memory and the talk work overwhelmed him nearly to his breaking point. He wanted to be there, so he imagined it more fully, shutting his eyes and sketching it in the darkness behind his eyelids, until he felt the familiar tug of motion deep in his gut. He never felt himself moving. It just happened.

And, a second later, he was there. But it looked different. The trees were no longer covered in leaves. Instead, the trunks were irreparably blackened and the grass was singed brown. He faced the river, but where the dock should be, only a single leg remained poking out of the water. Splinters were scattered along the water’s edge, but what had once been there was no longer anywhere in sight. The only constant was the way the sun shone over the water. Even then, the tops of the trees across the river didn’t block out the sunlight.

Struck with the sudden urge to check Summerland, he turned, trotting through the naked wood, in the direction he knew the school to be. A quick check told him that no one was alive here, either, within twenty miles. That was all he needed to know.

To his relief, Summerland still stood. Not as perfect as it had been weeks ago, or months ago, or years ago - however far into the future this was - but it hadn’t been reduced to rubble. The walls were chipped and broken, and the windows were smashed, but it still looked like Summerland. To his surprise, even the MRI machine that he had accidentally moved was still in the same place. Tipped onto its side and battered and more broken than it had been, but there. Everything still looked recognisable. As sad as it was to think about, it could have been worse.

And this meant he had a place to stay.

He entered through the front. Although he knew no one would be here, the silence still crept eerily up his neck and into his ears, raising goosebumps over his skin. These walls weren’t designed to be abandoned, and he passed empty chairs and wilted plants and broken equipment yearning for everyone to come back. Melanie and Ptonomy and Cary… they belonged _here._ Not at Division Three - not dead. None of it was supposed to be like this.

But it was.

Or, maybe, it _would_ be. This was the future, after all.

“Not my future,” David murmured to himself. This couldn’t be his future anyways. Future Syd had said that he’d bashed Farouk’s brains in, and he knew full well he hadn’t gotten the chance to do that. That meant this version of the future wasn’t his. Whoever caused this messed wasn’t him.

He tried a light switch. No use. The electricity had either been cut off, or the lights were broken, or both. Great. He lifted a forearm, sparking it with his own electricity until little blue lines curled across his skin, glowing just enough that, when he ducked into the inner hallways, where there were no windows to let in the sunlight, he could see where he was going.

This was definitely _not_ the future he wanted.

He reached the dorm. Pillows and blankets clung to bedsides, the curtains at each bed opening were absent at some and dangling loosely at others, the lightboards behind the beds were dark, and the air lingered still and tasted stale, but it still felt distinctly his, if only slightly. Small slats near the tops of the walls served as windows to allow light through, but as he walked, he found the floor covered with a thin layer of ash: the same ash that he had found in the city earlier. He amped up the brightness and came closer.

Some of the beds had ash sprinkled across the sheets, while others didn’t.

David felt unease stir in his gut. He made his way to his old bed. No ash on this one, at least. He climbed in, crossed his legs, and looked out into the room. It was even more stunning to look out into the room and see the same walls, the same portraits hanging from the same places, the same drawers in the center of the room, and feel like nothing was the same anymore. No one in the hallways, no one in the other cots, no one in the nearest fifty miles. Why would the future him want to be the only person in the world?

He ran a hand over his face, squeezing his eyes shut.

* * *

_“It started like any other idea,” Syd said, sadness in her eyes gleaming brightly in their private, multicoloured room: “as an egg.” She looked aside, lost in her mind, not quite there. She was, David knew, envisioning her world, her future, whatever jumbled up mess had happened that made her so desperate that she had plucked David out of his own time to ask for his help. “And then the few of us who are left went into hiding. But we don't have long. It's coming.”_

_David frowned. “What's coming?” What she said sounded in line with what he knew. The only monster he knew that could cause Sydney to become so desperate was... “Farouk?”_

_“No, he's dead in my timeline. You killed him.”_

_Now, it was his turn to act surprised. Not an act: the truth. Surprised and… almost pleased, that he was - that he would be, in the future - powerful enough to kill Farouk. “When?”_

_“About a week from now. In the desert. You bashed his brains in.”_

_“Huh.” Right. For some reason, he had been imagining something a little more impressive. Making Farouk’s brain explode with his telekinesis. Sending Farouk flying into a wall so hard that it broke his spine. Phasing Farouk into a wall and watching the horror on his bloodied face as he took his last breath: vengeance, for what he had done to Lenny. “Well, then, who-”_

_“It doesn't matter,” Syd cut in, lifting her chin. “We need him when things turn.”_

_Needed_ Farouk? _No. Not when Lenny was dead, not when all those soldiers at Division Three were dead. Not just once, but twice - once, when he’d had control of David, and once when he’s had control of Oliver and Lenny. “He killed -”_

_“He killed a few. This thing kills everyone.”_

* * *

To his surprise, he found canned food in the kitchen. The dates on the cans had been wiped out of existence - not one out of the eight cans that he found had dates printed on them, no matter how many times he looked - but that hardly mattered to David, who had now been stuck in the future for at least a day now. Maybe a day and a half. According to _his_ time, anyways. For all he knew, time could be at a standstill here.

He had a few cold peas and half a can of cold tomato soup for a meal and set aside the other cans for another time. This would keep him going for a few days, at least. Maybe a week, if he stretched out his rations. He had gone off less before, back when he couldn’t live without a drug in his system for less than an hour. Had spent his time sniffing out dealers and spending his money on whatever he could to get a high. If that meant he couldn’t eat, then he wouldn’t eat. Hunger was gnawing, but withdrawal was searing. He wouldn’t die if he went hungry for half a day, or a whole day.

The world remained the same as it was when he had arrived: dead and stagnant. At least today there were small clouds moving in the sky. As David explored, every so often, he would look up, just to remind himself that he wasn’t the only thing on the earth that still moved. Just because there were no living people around here didn’t mean nature didn’t still work. Future him couldn’t control the weather, at least. That fact should have come as a relief to him, but he hardly felt its brush through the constant, low simmering nerves that always played across his breastbone and the insides of his arms. So what if the future version of himself couldn’t control the weather? He still had power. He still had a lot of power.

And hopefully, David would figure out exactly what that was. Ideally before he ran out of food.

When David thought of apocalypses, he thought of scorched forests and drained rivers and deserts parched by supersuns. But the familiar trees around his childhood home were still intact. They swayed in the breeze, as full of life as they were when he had spent his time there as a child.

The same couldn’t be said for the house. An small, unfamiliar car sat in the old driveway, surrounded by the rubble of what used to be the house. He couldn’t say the sight surprised him. His future self must have thought any ties to his old life distressing enough to destroy. Still - David’s heart ached.

He tried his old city next - the one where he and Amy lived, and where Clockworks resided. Amy’s apartment was fine, and so was his, but Clockworks, too, had become a target for his future self. The sight of it didn’t sadden him in the slightest. If his morals were looser, he would probably have done the same thing. And he _had,_ once. Not him. Sydney. But his powers had wrecked the doors and windows once. He’d gotten his revenge.

Suddenly, he felt a pressure at the back of his mind. Back in his time, when there were plenty of people around, he felt it constantly: the underlying reminder that people were everywhere around him. That there were people who _existed,_ all around him, everywhere. He had once thought it to be a product of his schizophrenia, like some kind of _normal_ his brain produced for him that didn’t fit into anyone else’s definition of normal. But he was far beyond normal, and this was no illness of the mind. More like a superpower of the mind, meant to tell him when someone was nearby.

The problem was, everyone around here was dead.

“Good job,” came his own voice, from behind him. “Getting here, I mean.”

David turned, expecting to see an exact duplicate of himself.

For the most part, it _was_ him. His own face and his own blue eyes looked back at him from the top of an eight foot wall, scrutinising and proud at the same time. He sat squatted, his own bare arms rested over the tops of his knees, fingers slightly curled, like they were clutching something David couldn’t see.

But the similarities ended there.

Future David had grown his hair out, but instead of falling over his shoulders, it defied every law of gravity and ran in the opposite direction: straight up, the tips ending in a well groomed, albeit imperfect, point. He wore a black sleeveless vest with a red stripe running across the front, and a high red collar, undone in the middle so that most of his front was exposed. His trousers were orange and loose, and his feet were bare. He looked every bit the picture of a man who had found exactly what style of clothing he wanted, and flaunted it without a second thought. It didn’t look... _bad._ In fact, it looked pretty good.

“We have the same taste,” Future David remarked with a smirk. “I knew you’d like it before you even saw me.”

“Don’t read my mind.” David took a step back, brushing aside a piece of debris with his boot. “How long have you known I was here?”

“Since the moment you got here. I have to say, I’m impressed you actually got here with something other than the daiquiri.” Future David raised a brow, stepping to the side and looking him over. David could almost feel his gaze, as though he was actually touching him. “How’d you do it?”

“I have my ways.” David had the feeling he shouldn’t tell this other him anything about himself, and if he had a feeling, he would follow through with it.

Future David raised an eyebrow, his expression falling slightly. “Hmm.” A pause. “Who’s Switch?”

“No one.”

“Must be someone important,” Future David continued, as though he hadn’t heard what David said. “You sounded pretty panicked when you got here. What, did you come here trying to look for them and end up getting lost?”

So many questions - they were starting to make David’s head spin. “I came here on purpose.”

“Why?” Those blue eyes, so identical to his, and yet so strangely different, lit with an edged curiosity. They made David’s skin crawl. “Because you wanted to see what would happen to you? To us? I’ll answer that: something great happens.” Before David could answer, he fired off another question. “Where are you from? What time are you from?”

David’s mind began to drift. He could feel it wandering away from him, as though his thoughts had sudden turned into fog in some attempt to get away from him. He pressed the heel of his palm into his temple and shook his head.

_You’re really not getting very far when it comes to talking to him, you know._

_Yeah, but he’s asking too many questions!_

He stared off at a lone bench across the street. How long had it been since someone had sat in it? A few days? A few months? A few years? He didn’t know how far into the future this was. Future Syd had never told him. His focus shifted to another bench, more dilapidated than the other. A lone car, sitting at the side of the street, probably unlocked. Several little trees that lined the corner of the street. The branches weren’t moving. He couldn’t feel any wind on his skin, either. But the clouds were moving above them. He looked up. No - the clouds had disappeared. There were no clouds. Maybe there had never been clouds.

“Are you with me, David?”

For a moment, David heard Clark’s voice from somewhere afar. It took him a second for his mind to return to the right time, for him to realise it was only his future self prodding him. “How...” He reached across his abdomen, playing with his sleeves. “How did you become like this? What did you do to this world?”

Future David chuckled. “You must be from _way_ back in the past. Before… well. Fine. I’ll take that as an answer.” With a grunt, he sat himself comfortably on his wall, leaning on an arm. “I did what I needed to do to this world. I went after Farouk, just like they said I should. And I killed him.” He tapped the side of his head, and David knew: he’d bashed Farouk’s head in, just like Future Syd had said. “And you know what? I liked it. Killing him. He deserved it. He _deserves_ it, since he’s still alive in your timeline.”

“How do you -”

“You wouldn’t have had to come here to see me for yourself if you’d killed him.” Future David smirked. “I killed him, and everyone else watched me. Sydney, Clark, Lenny. The Loudermilks. Remember: they asked me to kill him. And then I did. And you know what they saw? They saw a killer. They saw someone who lost his mind. Not at first, of course. No, they were happy that Farouk was dead. We defeated the monster. We were finally free.” He laughed, but it was humourless. “But then they started to turn on me.”

David ran a hand down the side his face, lightly dragging his nails across his skin. “Why?”

“They thought the things I did were wrong after that. You know what they say: you can’t look at anyone the same after you watch them kill someone. Well - maybe they don’t say that, but that’s the thing about morality, isn’t it?” His tone turned mocking. “‘Killing is wrong, no matter who it is.’ Even if it’s Farouk, apparently. Bullshit.”

“They thought you were wrong for… for killing Farouk?” He thought of Syd and the barrel of her gun, pointed straight between his eyes. It had been Farouk who had manipulated Syd and the rest to think he was the bad guy. It was an idea, it was a trick, it was an _egg_ laid by the Shadow King himself. They weren’t the ones who thought he was the bad guy. They hadn’t thought it themselves.

Had they?

Future David narrowed his eyes. “I didn’t need that in my life. So I decided it would be better to… shut them up.”

David blinked, shaking his head. _Wake up!_ “You killed them?”

“Did I say that?” Future David laughed again, and this time, it was genuine. But something about it was off. “I just messed with their minds a little. Made them think I was right, and they were wrong. Little white lies, to keep them off my back. Nothing bad. But there were just too many complications. Cary started to question the others. He always was the smart one. So I thought… _I don’t need them._ And I left.”

That didn’t make David feel better. Again, he prodded. “You killed them?”

Future David shook his head. “No. That was my mistake. Skip forward a few months later. They were still alive, and I was… living my life. Travelling the world. Having a lot of fun, actually. I was an international sensation. People loved me. They saw I was right, and that I had powers, and that I could give them whatever they wanted. So they became my followers.” He leaned forward, and David saw the zeal in his eyes. “And then the armies came. Division Three, Division Two, Division One - they all thought they could catch me. After all those years, they _still_ thought I was wrong. That I should be stopped. Who was I, but another villain in their book? After all… Farouk was dead. They needed another target. Another evil mutant. So they picked me.”

“But…” David frowned. “You created this world.”

“No,” said his future self. _“They_ created this world. What was I doing, except living my life? I wasn’t evil. I existed. And that was wrong of me.”

Those words struck David wrong. He clenched his fingers and unclenched them. “But you killed everyone that came after you. You could’ve, I don’t know, talked things through with them.”

“They didn’t want to talk. They wanted to kill.”

“And your friends?” David challenged. “What about them? There’s no one alive around here. I checked. One hundred miles, and not a single soul alive.”

Future David laughed. “A hundred miles doesn’t cover the whole world, kid.”

“If they’re dead here, they’re dead everywhere. I’m not arguing with you about this.” His head felt clearer now. He felt more aware, more awake. “How did it feel, killing your friends? Clark? What about Syd, huh? Did you feel good when you killed her?”

Future David paused for a moment in thought. “Death is a side effect.” He shrugged a shoulder. “Thinking I was wrong was a symptom. So I offered them a cure.”

“You _killed_ them,” David pressed, stepping forward. “You’re _alone_ here, with no one but yourself. There’s barely any food around because you killed everyone who could have made that food. There’s no one you can have a conversation with. Everything’s abandoned. And you expect to live in this world?”

“Nobody was my friend, David. Why don’t you get that?” Future David stretched his legs. He pushed himself off the wall, floating gracefully down and landing on his feet. He watched David for a beat, then stepped forward. “You shouldn’t call people who try to kill you your friends. They’ll stab you in the back one day and leave you bleeding in the rear alley without a glance back. Learn this stuff. Nobody is your friend.”

David ground his teeth. The way his future self said it - so confident and certain that everything he said was correct - made David want to scream. They were from different timelines, for God’s sake. This guy wasn’t him. Simple: he was some perverted version of him in a parallel universe far away from his. A complete mirror image, where everything was wrong. This world was wrong. Future David’s assumptions about his old friends were wrong. Sure, they had called _David_ wrong and accused him of future crimes, but that had been Farouk’s fault.

“Then you,” said Future David, “of all people, should know they’re not your friends. How can you forgive Syd, after she tricked you? Tricked you into helping Farouk, so that her present self could finally see that you weren’t the person she wanted you to be? They put you on _trial,_ David. They tricked you. They caged you. They called you a monster.”

He had never told the future him anything about that. Future David was reading his mind.

In less than a second, David pulled up the barriers around his mind and staggered back, lifting both hands to his head. “Stop it!” He should have _known._ “Stop reading my mind!”

Future David took another step forward. “You read minds all the time. I’m only doing what you do. I only ever do what you do.” He sounded nothing like David.

“Shut up!” David took another step back. “You’re _not_ me. You’re not _David,_ you’re a monster!”

Future David grinned - a terrifying grin - and pressed a hand to his chest. “Are we calling everyone who reads minds without the other person knowing a monster now? Did I miss the memo?” He shook his head. “No. I’m afraid you’re wrong about that. I’m not a monster. But you’re right. I’m not you.”

“Then _who -”_

“I have more than one name. Four, five… twenty, a hundred, it doesn’t matter. Put them together and what do you get?” He lifted a hand, sticking his thumb out. Then, the other four, one at a time, as though he was counting something off the top of his head. _Two. Three. Four… five._ “You get all of us, here. You get Legion.” He looked at David. This time, the amusement in his eye had faded, replaced with something strange and solemn and unknown. “That’s what they call me. That’s what they’re going to call _you,_ once they find out about your powers.”

Something crawled up David’s spine, and he couldn’t help shuddering with it. This couldn’t be him. Something had happened to make him this way. The Divisions coming after him, the time he had spent away from them - something had changed him into this thing, this abomination, this… _Legion._ And he wanted to know what that was.

Slowly, David began to move back, stepping into the street. “Who’s we?” He shifted part of his mind from his mental barrier, stretching it away, moving it out around Legion, slowly, so as not to alert him to his efforts. If he could just get a glimpse into Legion’s mind, maybe he could figure out what had made him this way.

Legion lifted a brow, looking as though he had realised something. He stepped to the side, reaching out for a lamp post and leaning on his arm. “You don’t know.” He straight his back, looking down his nose at David despite their shared height. “Everything in your mind, and you still don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” David reached the middle of the street. His mind circled Legion, ever so slowly, in a wide arc. He had to keep him talking. Keep him thinking about what he wanted to say, instead of what was going on around him.

“We,” said Legion, bringing a hand up to his temple, “are what is inside of my mind. And we have powers far beyond anything _you’re_ capable of.”

David wasn’t going to let him know about his confusion. Confident was key. “I have your powers too.” If they were the same people, then they had the same powers. Common sense.

“No you don’t.” Legion grinned, pushing away from the lamp post. “Do you know what happens when, say, pianists practice every day? Their fingers get stronger. Their movements are refined. Their skills sharpen. And then, when they’ve finally mastered a piece, they learn a new piece, a little harder. And when they’ve mastered that piece, they learn another, harder piece.” He stepped toward David, and David had to shift his reach. “They do their scales. They practice. They get better. They build a repertoire. I’m just like a pianist. I’ve been building my repertoire of powers. You’re just a beginner. A novice. You’re weak.”

“I’m _not_ weak.” David narrowed his eyes. His concentration faltered with his frustration, but he was quick to pull it back. Legion was trying to get a rise out of him. That couldn’t happen. Just a few more seconds of enduring this lecture, and he could strike. “I’ve been practicing.”

“You’re weak if you have to ask who ‘we’ is. You don’t know the half of your own abilities. You don’t know who you really are.”

David shifted his field. Perfect. “I know exactly who I am. I’m David. _You’re_ the one who doesn’t know who he is. You’re an imposter. You’re a fraud.”

 _“I_ was not the one who trespassed in your world.”

Legion started to take another step toward him, but before he could move, David pulled every inkling of power he had into closing his mind around Legion’s. His barrier collapsed, its energy cascading toward his doppelgänger in a heavy wave. As their minds crashed, David strengthened his efforts, digging invisible claws into Legion’s mind wall. It was as thick as a ream of paper, and David had to sharpen his edges just to burrow in. A thousand memories flickered across his mind’s eye, and a thousand feelings burned in his chest and his mind: buildings on fire and people leaping from the flames, only to meet their deaths on the ground below; children crying by the bodies of their parents, who had dared to go against the likes of such a powerful mutant as him; three armies, which he knew belonged to the Divisions, split up and surrounding him on all sides as he, fifty feet in the air, shot waves of energy that disintegrated anything it touched and left ashes in their wake; Farouk’s dead body underneath him, his head split open, blood pooling around his neck and shoulder, and the euphoria rushing through his own veins at the very sight of it.

Then there was Farouk, again: not an image of him, but a feeling, deep within himself, of absolutely power, absolute control, mingled with confidence and grace. Different, but not something he hated. In fact, he felt the opposite: he felt strong, felt powerful.

He felt like _himself_ again.

David hesitated.

Before he could dig any further, he felt his mind forced out in all directions, stretching it so wide that a flash of pain ran through his head. In another moment, he was flying back, crashing into the side of a truck and toppling over the top. He landed on the other side, his elbow and head slamming against the concrete.

“I told you,” came Legion’s voice from somewhere on the other side of the truck, as David came to a rolling stop on his back. “You’re weaker than me.”

“Not…” David’s voice sounded far away, and when he looked up at the sky, he could see black specks. _“You’re_ weak… not…”

Legion appeared at his feet, his arms crossed. “Who’s the one on the ground?”

David groaned, closing his eyes and bringing an arm up to rest over his forehead. His mind was a blur, and his thoughts were thin, too weak to grasp onto. If he could only stay here… if he could only _rest_ for a while, he could think. Still, one feeling lingered in his mind, even through the pain, that he couldn’t get rid of. “What… what was that?”

“Be more specific, kid.” Legion kicked at his boot. “Come on. What was _what?_ Use your words.”

God, his head hurt. “Feeling… weird feeling, in… in your mind.”

“That’s not very helpful.”

“Read… read my mind, then.”

“I’m sorry.” Legion stepped to David’s side, squatting and placing a hand on his chest. “Didn’t you just tell me a few minutes ago _not_ to read your mind? I believe your exact words were, _‘Stop reading my mind.’”_

David wasn’t in the mood to argue. “Read it.”

“I’m not reading your mind. Especially not after you hit your head.” He tilted his head, as though contemplating something. It was a wonder his hair kept its shape like that. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you a deal.” He reached out, brushing his fingers over David’s jaw. “I have a soft spot for you. The last thing I want is for you to starve to death here, of all places. An unknown world - an unknown universe? No. You can’t die here.”

David turned his head away, tilting his chin from Legion’s touch. “Don’t touch me.”

Legion ignored him. “Why don’t we work together, instead? To get you back to your past, where you belong? After all, it’s much better to have a partner. Someone to work with.”

“Do you?” David head was beginning to clear. Slowly, he reached for Legion’s wrist, pulling his hand from his chest and sitting up on an arm. “You’re alone here.”

“I _told_ you, David: there’s more to me than you’ll ever know. I’m not alone. I am a we.”

“And you think this stuff in your head… whatever it is - means you’re not alone?”

Legion’s eyes narrowed, and David felt hope flutter in his chest. “Why shouldn’t it?”

That look meant that he was getting somewhere. He hoped, at least. As he spoke, he worked on regaining his senses and his powers, drawing them back from behind the fog of his mind. “Just because you have voices in your head doesn’t mean you’re not alone. You only have one body, and that body is alone. You have no one else. No physical contact.” He racked his mind for something faint: a memory from Clockworks. “Doctor Kissinger, he said all animals need physical contact to feel love. You’re not getting any physical contact here, alone, ruling an empty world where everyone else is dead.”

His words had an effect on Legion, whose eyes narrowed even more, and who drew back and stood again. For a moment, David thought he might kick him, but he only looked off, down the street, and laughed. “I don’t need to feel love.”

“Sure you do.” David sat up. His head still spun. “I’m you. You from the past, but still _you._ And I think I deserve love.” That wasn’t the full truth. He _did_ deserve love, but this was for demonstration’s sake. “That means, somewhere in your past, you thought _you_ deserved love. Maybe you still do. And you know what? You don’t get any.”

“I _am_ loved,” Legion said, too quickly.

“You _don’t get_ any love,” David pushed, against his better knowledge. His mind was almost completely clear now. If he was smart, he would disappear right now and never come back. But no one had ever called him smart, and he wasn’t willing to start now. “You got angry, and you destroyed the world. And now you’re asking me to team up with you?”

Legion shook his head, stepping away from David. “I’m the strongest being in the world. I’m not asking because I need you. I’m asking because you need me.”

“I don’t need you. If I needed you, I would’ve said I did.”

“But you did. There’s no food here.” With a hum, Legion wandered in front of David, turning to face him. He folded his arms behind his back. “You’ll starve before you find your way out of here. If you don’t want that, then I suggest you join me. I can teach you everything you don’t know about your mind. Your powers. We could be beautiful.”

David moved his aching arm. He couldn’t fully straighten his arm before his elbow began to hurt. “There is no _we.”_

“But there could be.”

“There never will be.”

Legion contemplated the words, silent. He clicked his tongue, tilting his head to one side, then the other, his hair moving with it, as though it were forcing itself to stay stood upright. “All right. If that’s how you feel about it.” He unfolded his arms, lifting one hand to his temple. “It’s a shame. We could have made an unstoppable team.”

David felt something press against his mind. It was an stifling feeling, that he remembered happening only twice before: once, when Farouk had fought back against his own exorcism; and again, when David had gone against him in the desert, when Farouk had wrapped him in his web. He felt it like a physical illness, as though his head were suddenly clouded with fever. His head pounded with it, quivering on the edge of something more terrible, he knew, than anything he had ever experienced.

“We would make a great team.” As Legion spoke, something began to shift in David’s mind, as though his thoughts were following an invisible tide, out from himself and toward the other. “You want to learn who you are, don’t you? I know who you are. I _am_ who you are. Who you _could_ be.”

_No, no, no! Don’t listen to him!_

_You’re in for a bad time if you keep this up, baby._

“So,” said Legion, and his voice suddenly sounded louder - deep inside David’s mind, “learn from me. Learn what I know. Make yourself stronger. Bring it back to your past. You want to stop Division Three from bringing you down, don’t you?”

David never told him that. He shouldn’t have known that. David never _told_ him that.

_Get him out of here!_

His mind began to drift again. With his aching head, he could barely fight against it. He didn’t _want_ to fight against it. As long as his mind was moving, flowing in some direction, why did it matter whether it went on its own or because of something else outside of him? Legion was only trying to help him understand.

_David!_

_Wake up!_

Something tapped against his mind. In front of him, Legion took a step forward, his arms still folded behind his back, a wry smile at his lips. “You are as you were before. Sweet. But there’s no room for that here. In order to survive, you must become like me.” He paused. “Like us.”

_Bad idea._

And suddenly, he felt a presence next to his. His powers shuddered inside of him, as if on their own accord, fighting back against Legion’s hold. His mind became clearer, until he realised just what had happened: that Legion had somehow grabbed hold of his thoughts and controlled them, if only for a few seconds. He shook his head, forcing himself to stand on legs that ached and shook from strain, clutching his arm to his chest.

“You’re very sharp,” Legion barked. He stood in front of David, louring. “And strong. I should have expected it.”

“Stop doing that.”

“Reading your mind?”

“Controlling it.”

“Are you against it?” Legion scoffed, rolling his shoulders back. “I would have thought that you’d cheer at such a display. You’ve done it yourself, haven’t you? Made people believe what you want them to believe, because it was easier for you to deal with that than to try and reason it out with your words and watch them throw them aside. What am I doing that you wouldn’t do? I am you, David. We are the same.”

David stretched his fingers at his side. His exasperation lingered there, in the tips, plain and infuriating. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“You need control.” Stepping forward, Legion raised his hands to rest on David’s cheeks. He ran his thumbs across his cheekbones, his lips pressed into a thin line, the corners raised in a smile. If David didn’t know any better, he would call it benevolent. It was anything but. “You need something to ground you. I can help you.”

Those words called a memory to David’s mind’s eye: of a dozen people, standing in a wide circle in front of him, clutching their collars and their chests, tears in their eyes as they listened to him speak of help and guidance. Whatever they needed, he could give, as long as they stayed for a while. As long as they loved each other. As long as they agreed to do what he said. It was a small price to pay for curing all the problems in their lives.

He reached up, curling his fingers around Legion’s wrists. “I don’t _need_ help.”

Legion clicked his tongue. His gaze softened, sliding across David’s face as though in a sympathetic caress. “You don’t sound sure about that.”

“I’m sure.” With a quick tug, David pulled Legion’s hands from his face. He let go and stepped back. “I’m not the one that needs help. _You_ need help.”

“Oh.” His future self laughed. _“I_ need help? Well, then, that means _you_ need help too, doesn’t it?”

That did it. “I’m done with you.” He shut his eyes, pulling his mind in and throwing a barrier around his mind for good measure. He wanted to go back - back to Summerland, back to safety, back to where he belonged. He was hungry and tired, and there was food waiting for him, and beds, and he could rest there. Very faintly, he could hear Legion say something, but he wasn’t listening. His gut lurched, and then, in another moment, the feeling faded.

He opened his eyes to the creek and running water. For a moment, he stood there, staring at the reflection of the afternoon sun on its surface. Legion, he found, after a brief feel of his mind, was nowhere near here. He hadn’t come after him, which was better, he thought, than nothing. Good.

Suddenly exhausted, and with much to think about, David returned to the inner workings of Summerland. Evidently, he had a little more work to do before he could properly beat himself.

He just hoped that came sooner rather than later.


	2. All of My Demons Are My Friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> David confronts Legion.

_She was waiting for him, sitting at the edge of the large basin, spread wide enough that anyone could seat themselves around it as they peered into its misty beyonds. He didn’t have to say a word to know she already knew exactly why he had come. Silent, she watched him, her expression solemn. Almost guilty… like she hadn’t wanted him to figure out that his sister would be killed. Maybe she had wanted a different outcome, and had thought coming to him would prevent it._

_David couldn’t believe it, as much as he wanted to. He came forward several steps, then stopped, unwilling to come any closer. “Did you know?”_

_She raised her chin. “I'm sorry,” she said: quickly, as though it were only a passing comment, and not an apology. “Stay focused.”_

_He couldn’t believe her. Stay focused? On what, trying to find Farouk’s body? The last thing he wanted to focus on right now was cooperating with her to find his body. He had been willing, at first, to listen to what she’d had to say. She was so worried about the fate of the world, and about his past. And maybe she still was now, but looking at her, when she wasn’t telling him anything - she looked like a stranger. “She was my sister.”_

_“I'm sorry,” came her reply, sounding just as empty as it had the first time. Her eyes stayed steady on his. He thought he saw, deep within her eyes, a hint of desperation. “You have to stay focused.”_

_She didn’t care. That was it. She didn’t care what happened to Amy, or Lenny, or anyone else in his timeline. She only cared about what was happening in_ her _timeline. “On what? Preventing some maybe-apocalypse?”_

_Future Syd moved her gaze. It strayed to the floor and stuck._

_He stood where he was, feeling exposed and vulnerable and stupid. She had to understand. He had to make her understand. She needed to understand how_ he _felt, how terribly_ he _felt. They couldn’t get anywhere if she didn’t. “He killed her. Don't you understand? He mutilated her and turned her into -” Into… into Lenny. And maybe that wasn’t even Lenny. Maybe she was an illusion too, that Farouk had made, just for him. He always liked doing that. “And how do we know Farouk can stop it, if he does get his body back?”_

_“We don't.” She looked back at him calmly and, for a long moment, said nothing, only watching, only gauging his reaction. “But I know we lose without him.”_

_So that was all she cared about. Saving Farouk so that she could prevent the apocalypse in her own timeline. So that she could stop her own future. That would have been fine, if she had exercise any kind of sympathy for him. Any sorrow for his loss and grief. He would have felt justified. He_ had, _at first. But now? Now, his own sister was dead, and his future girlfriend had nothing to say for it, and nothing to feel for it._

_He shook his head. “You're not Syd. Not my Syd.”_

_Future Syd stood from her seat and came toward him. She reached for his hand, and when they touched, he flinched. Not visibly, but enough that he knew Future Syd could feel it. He expected to suddenly be pulled from his mind, the way the swap had happened at Clockworks, and shoved into her body. But nothing happened - no swap, no disconnect, no confusion. He remained himself, and she remained herself. He had forgotten, for a moment, that he wasn’t in his physical body._

_“I want to be,” she murmured softly, bringing his hand to her lips and pressing a kiss to his knuckles. They were soft, and moved across his skin like a whisper, a sigh in a touch of warm breath. This was new to him. Syd’s body - her physical body - was new to him. This wasn’t Syd, exactly. Her body lacked an arm, her features were well worn from years of experience and the pain of dealing with the monster in her timeline, her hair was longer, her torn clothes seemed only to cling to her body as an afterthought. But she knew him the way he knew her, and now, he could really touch her for the first time._

_It felt wrong. He and Syd had made ground rules. He couldn’t do anything with her. “Syd,” he breathed regretfully, pulling his hand away and shutting his eyes. “Don't.” He pressed his wrist to his temple and curled his fingers. The warmth of her touch still lingered over his skin._

_“Okay,” Future Syd said. “I understand.”_

_“I can't.” He looked back at her, and saw that her eyes were filled with confusion and longing and worry. It made him feel guilty, and so, so sorry. He didn’t want to keep anything from her, no matter who she was. “I promised.”_

_Her gaze wandered around his face. She was searching for something. Some sign that he wasn’t lying, that she could trust him, that she could still hold faith in him. It broke his heart. “You should go, if you don't want to help.”_

_“I_ do. _I just -”_

_“No, no. I understand. It's too much. I'm asking too much.” She stared up at him, her eyes tugging at his aching heart. “Go. I'll be okay. The world. Just live. Make good choices. Maybe things will turn out different.”_

* * *

David shoved the now empty can of chopped pineapples across the table, watching as it fell across the edge and clattered to the ground below. He moved his arm under the table, casting just enough glow that he could watch it roll to a stop, then stretched his fingers out and brought it floating back up onto the table. The darkness of Summerland’s buildings felt safer to David than they had when he had first arrived. He could practice his light whenever he wanted.

And he did, for the most part, practice. He could stretch his mind nearly one hundred miles in every direction. That made almost two hundred from end to end, which was a far cry better than he would have managed when he had first discovered his powers. In fact, two hundred miles was a far cry better than he could have managed when he had left Division Three. He had been practicing his powers ever since then, in preparation for something big he knew was coming. His life was never peaceful for long. Those powers he could practice by himself, he practiced on his own, and those he needed other people for, he practiced on strangers, on people he met, on people he liked and people he hated.

But here, there were no people, and that meant no way to practice his mind-reading. Maybe it wouldn’t prove to be disastrous, not having as much experience with it here. He had Legion to focus on, and they were just as powerful as each other. He could survive this.

So he spent his time practicing what he could do on his own: telekinesis, astral projection, matter manipulation. Everything he could do, he did tenfold, over and over again, drilling the practice into his mind until he could hardly stand it anymore - until he could hardly _stand,_ in need of a break. If he wanted any chance at defeating Legion, he had to know his own powers. Legion had said it himself: the only person capable of beating him was himself, and that meant David. That meant David could _stop_ him, before he did anything worse to this timeline.

Days of practice yielded him more flexibility with his powers, like some sort of psychic mind-stretch before the actual exercise, if that exercise meant the difference between staying stuck in an apocalyptic future with no food forever and returning back to the proper timeline. He decided to test them in another abandoned city, somewhere several miles from the coast, where tall buildings looked across the landscape, just high enough that the ocean was visible from the very top.

He waited until he was in the middle of the building to do it. Pulling in all his energy, he sent it out again in a strong wave, sending chairs and tables and walls flying out and up, away from him. From the outside, it would look like an explosion. Pieces of brick and metal flew out across the city, and the dust that would have surrounded him blew out and away from him.

Pieces of the building fell around him. David listened as they met the ground, connecting hard enough that the ground shuddered beneath his feet. He could create chaos amidst an empty, desolate world, even when there was no chaos to be had. If he could see it, then it existed, and that was enough for him. That meant he could rival Legion when it came to it. He had no doubt his doppelgänger could do the same thing, but at least David could match him.

Eventually, the dust settled. The world became silent again.

David moved a broken piece of glass with his boot. Even if he _could_ match Legion, he still had no idea what would cause him to make such a mess in the first place. To kill the entire world so that only he existed here. This was a cold, lonely, stagnant life, no fun for anybody except, apparently, Legion.

Maybe this was the only world he could control. Maybe the only way he could control himself was through controlling the world - was through _killing_ the world.

Still: it didn’t make any sense that Legion would offer to team up with him, if he didn’t want anyone else here. To partner with another mutant, with the exact same abilities, the exact same name, the exact same face, the exact same general body - although Legion’s might have been a little more… _toned_ than David’s - screamed danger at every corner.

Shutting his eyes, he sent himself a few hundred miles, until he stood in the middle of a wheatfield, devoid of actual wheat. Only fallen stalks from years ago remained, trampled and scattered and worn by weather. Apparently, his future self wasn’t a very good farmer.

“Legion!” He cracked his fingers, waited several seconds, and glanced around. “Come out! I’ve thought about what you said!” His voice echoed through the field and resonated against the trees. It could only carry so far, but David had no doubt Legion knew exactly where he was and what he was doing.

Sure enough, seconds later, Legion appeared on the other side of the field, hovering twenty feet in the air, a smug grin on his lips. His hair stood as straight as ever, inflated toward the roots and curling up into a single point, like the head of a paintbrush. He lowered himself down slowly, only speaking once he landed on his feet. “I said a lot of things, kid. You’ll have to be more specific.”

“About working together.” David stepped forward.

Legion lifted a brow, crossing his arms. “You’ve considered my offer?”

He took another step, strengthening the barrier around his mind. He couldn’t take any chances when it came to Legion reading his mind and figuring out his lie. “Yeah. I thought about it. And I think you’re right, about not being able to make it in this world alone.”

“You admit I’m stronger than you.” Legion chuckled.

David hesitated. He should lie. Legion didn’t mean it as a jab at his pride - and disagreeing with him would do him no favours. “Maybe.”

“Ah - what was that pause?”

“Maybe you’re stronger than me,” he said again, louder. “Maybe you’re right. I can’t live in this world by myself. I need people to talk to, I need something to do, I need a reason to live.”

Legion came forward. “You have plenty of reason to live. More reason than you know, yet. Why would you want to lose all the power you contain inside yourself - a multitude, far greater than anyone else who’s ever existed - before you even discover what it is?” His voice wasn’t soft, but it had its own understanding edge. “You’re powerful.”

David felt his chest clench. “I don’t want to lose my chance. So I came to you. I need help.”

“You need _my_ help. And I’ll give it to you.” Ten feet in front of him, Legion stopped. “I want to help you return to your past, David. I know how you can return.”

David felt the urge to reach out and read Legion’s mind, to make sure he was telling the truth. He had grown used to reading everyone else’s. But Legion would detect it the moment he tried. It was too risky. He needed to lower Legion’s defences before he tried to overtake him, and losing any footing would set him back too much. “How?”

“It’s one of my powers.” Legion smirks, like he had just told David something he should have found obvious.

It _wasn’t_ obvious. “What? One of your powers is time travel?”

“Of course. You haven’t discovered it yet, but I have. I can travel anywhere in time I like.”

“Then why haven’t you left this place?” David couldn’t help the feeling that Legion might be bluffing. He seemed like that kind of person. “Why haven’t you come to my timeline instead?”

“This is my world, man.” Legion gestured to the field, to the trees, and to the sky. “I created this. I’m like God, here. Why would I want to travel to your past?”

“Because you’re bored? Because there’s no one else here to kill, and you need more people?”

Legion laughed. “I’m never bored anymore. The physical world is simply that: physical. The mind is what counts, for us. That’s where our powers are. Our minds, and our thoughts. Reality is a choice. I choose this one. And so will you, soon enough.”

“When?” David demanded. “Because I don’t see myself _ever_ preferring some apocalyptic future to the world I have now.”

“You will.” Legion stepped nearer, reaching out to rest his hand on David’s shoulder. “When you finally realise what you are. I’m the true you. I’m what you’re meant to be. There can be no version of you that isn’t me.”

David wanted so badly to say that he was wrong, that his argument was flawed, that he had changed his timeline simply by failing to kill Farouk in the desert. That was the truth, after all: Future Syd had said Farouk was dead in her timeline. He wasn’t dead in _David’s_ timeline. That had to count for something.

But he bit his tongue instead of damning his case, and nodded.

“Good.” Eyes twinkling, his future self squeezed his shoulder lightly.

David shifted, intending to step away, but found that he couldn’t move. “What -”

Legion’s lip curled into a smirk. “Relax.” He shut his eyes, and David felt the familiar shift in his stomach. The field shuddered, brightened, and melted away into nothing. Within a blink, they appeared in the center of a small, round structure. The walls were no more than ten feet tall, surrounding them on either side, and the ceiling came to a point fifteen feet above them. A single door stood to David’s right, and beneath his feet was a thin carpet of white fur - bear’s fur, given the fact that there was a bear’s head lying by his boot, attached to the carpet itself. On the floor near the walls on every side were lit candles, white wax dripping down the sides: the only source of light in the small structure.

It was dim, and, David thought, as he turned to look around the room, slightly claustrophobic. “Where are we?”

“Somewhere in what used to be Himalayan India.” Legion stepped back, leaning against a wall. He had lost his vest somewhere in the transition, and now crossed his arms over a bare chest. “North Sikkim District, to be exact.”

David stepped around the candles. His boots were still on, but he felt a distinct yearning to take them off, just so he could run his bare feet along the carpet. “Why?”

“It feels more personal here.”

It felt more _crowded_ here, was more like it. This place was too small, too cramped. Having two people here at the same time felt like too much. He made his way to the nearest wall and ran his fingers across the uneven surface. There were raised lines, made of wood, running diagonally in both directions. They were solid, structurally sound, and formed diamonds. Not a bad look in such low lighting. “You took us here because you wanted to be somewhere that felt personal?”

“Is that so bad?” Legion sounded amused. “Do you think I don’t know the meaning of ‘personal’ anymore? Yes. I took us here because this is the best place for us to discuss. You want to know who I am… and I want to know who you are. A win-win situation for the both of us.”

“We can talk anywhere in the world,” David pointed out, pressing his nail into the edge of the wood, “and no one will be able to hear us, because they’re all dead.”

“This isn’t a matter of privacy. ‘Private’ and ‘personal’ aren’t the same thing. Words are important.”

David vaguely recalled someone else telling him something similar, and it made him nervous for a reason he wasn’t entirely aware of. A shiver ran down his back. This place was suddenly too cramped, too confined. “I don’t care.” He drew in a breath, and found his throat pressed tight with worry. “I _don’t_ care. I don’t care about, whatever, ‘the meaning of things.’” He whirled to look at Legion.

On the other side of the room, his doppelgänger sat on a dark throne, wider than a normal chair, with stiles that rose above the back and ended in stylised ears. It definitely hadn’t been there five seconds ago, yet Legion was relaxed visibly, one leg draped over an arm, his elbow rested on the other, as though it had been there the entire time. His eyes were on David, sharp and visible in the gleam of the candles, and he was grinning. “No. No, those things are important, don’t you think?” The way he asked it made it sound as though it wasn’t a question he actually wanted an answer to. “Everything has a meaning. Every word, and every action. Your old friends, for example: they told you to kill Farouk. And then they saw what you would do - they saw that you _would_ kill him, that you were thirsty for it - and they decided your actions were enough to warrant you bad enough to stop. But you _weren’t_ the bad one, were you? Farouk was the bad one. Is currently the bad one, in your past.”

“Will always be the bad one,” David interjected, “unless I stop him. Which is why I came to you. I’m obviously not some exact duplicate of you. My timeline is different. Farouk isn’t dead, everyone’s after me, and I’m out running like some fugitive of the law. I don’t want that.”

Legion regarded him silently, his finger across his bottom lip. “What do you want?”

“I want Farouk to die.” He hadn’t planned to say this much, but the thought of the Shadow King never failed to enrage him. “A terrible, slow death. Maybe then, that will take his control out of their minds long enough for me to fiddle with them.”

“Fiddling with them doesn’t work. I tried.”

“Still, I need to kill him. I _need_ to kill him.” David moved away from the wall, careful not to stick his boot in any candle flames as he made his way back toward Legion. “Can’t you understand that?”

“Loud and clear the first time you said it, chief.” Legion spun around in his chair so that he was facing forward, crossed his legs, and leaned back again. He rested his arms to either side. He looked comfortable. He looked like he _belonged_ there, like a king. “I like your spirit.”

David tilted his head. Finally, he was getting somewhere. He hadn’t forgotten the plan, even if this sudden change of scenery threw him off. He had planned for the field to be his place of attack, because of all the room. This place, in whatever-district in India, wasn’t part of it. “It’s the same one as yours.” He came another step closer. “You hate him too. I know you do. You killed him, you hated him so much. _I_ hated him, but I couldn’t kill him. You teach me, and I’ll do it.”

Legion grinned lopsidedly. “Do you want to know why I brought you here?” He stretched his arm, waving his hand across a curve of the wall.

It shimmered and disappeared, leaving a wide expanse for a view. It was night, and therefore difficult to make out the details, but David saw well enough that their little one-room edifice sat atop a hill, and that the hill looked across an irregular, sloping stretch of land. Dotting the landscape were tents and small buildings, some even smaller than the one they were in, and some larger. Some were clustered together, as though signaling a center, a meeting place for whoever lived here. Far beyond these, visible only by the sharp light of the moon, towered walls that seemed thirty feet high. They curled around the buildings and stretched out of view, but David sensed that they ran right up their hill and around them. Anyone who was inside these walls - who didn’t have the power to leave themselves - would have a difficult time getting out.

“I brought you here,” Legion continued, stepping toward the hole in the wall, “because I wanted you to see what it’s like to be me. How it is to live as I live. What does this look like, to you?”

Squinting, David looked out into the darkness. Nothing moved. Nothing seemed alive. He could imagine that it might have been, once, filled with people of all ages, of all races, of all genders, of all ethnicities, all congregated at this single meeting place. “It looks like an abandoned camp.”

“It was more than a camp.” Legion stepped to the edge. “Come now, David. Don’t play stupid. You and I both know you’re smarter than this.”

David scowled and stretched his powers out. He felt a thin film of power running across the entire land. Not one place was untouched. Some spots had power embedded feet deep into the dirt, pulsing hot and palpable against his thoughts. Other spots were weaker, but carried a curiously bland sensation. He wondered why, for a moment, but then he hit it.

Or, more precisely, them. Many of them.

He didn’t know, at first, what he was sensing, although he knew it to be simultaneously gritty and polluted at the same time. Like someone had cut his head open and dumped a bucket of ashes right into his brain, and now they were swimming through his mind-feelers, brushing against his every thought and forcing him to brush them away - except he _couldn’t_ brush them away, and every time he tried to touch anything, a new layer of ashes coated his thoughts. The unnatural feeling occurred every now and again, mostly in those areas less concentrated with power, which made it easier for David to pick out exactly what he was feeling.

This was dead power. Not just dormant power - not just power that lay waiting to become activated after years of nothing. This was power that had once been alive and thriving in living mutants just like him and Legion and the people he knew. This was power that had once been useful, had once had potential. He didn’t have to search much more to realise that that potential had been snatched away through death. These were dead mutants scattered around the camp, like dead flies in soup.

His mind snapped back into place. He thought of his commune. This couldn’t be the same thing. This couldn’t be _his_ commune. Not all of them were mutants, and it definitely wasn’t in _India,_ of all places. He swallowed, his throat dry. “This was a mutant commune.”

Legion turned to face him, leaning back against the wall next to the opening. “Yes and no.” His eyes shone brightly. “Yes, this was a commune. No, this wasn’t a _mutant_ commune. There were plenty of people that were just boring humans, who needed me to clear their heads and bodies and lives of mutant tampering.”

No, no, no. He was _not_ telling him this right now. “But… you didn’t help them. They’re all dead.” This was _nothing_ like what David wanted.

“Sometimes, being dead is better than being alive.” Legion raised a brow. “I helped them. And when they began to question me, I helped them again, to understand how much power I truly had. Their understanding just happened to correspond with being dead.” He looked pleased at the memory. “And all this? This is what will happen someday, in your timeline.”

David frowned, stepping back. “No.”

“Like I said, David, you and I are the same. We’re two faces of the same coin. We always have been, ever since you were a baby.” Legion grinned. “We make the same decisions, always. I know you. I know all about you, even when you shield your thoughts from me.”

He paused, and suddenly, David felt Legion’s presence brush lightly across his consciousness. He hardened the walls around his mind. “You don’t.”

“I know you have a commune. I know you’re trying to help people. I know you want them to stay with you. Want them to _love_ you. I know you can’t live without that, because you deserve it. I know you’re twisting their thoughts, too, because it’s easier for you. I know you have a ninety-eight percent chance of becoming me, and that every moment you spend here, it gets a little higher. You can’t stop yourself from becoming who you truly are, David. You can only learn, you can only fulfill your destiny.” He sat quietly for a long moment, merely eyeing David. Then he inclined his chin and clicked his tongue. “I know you came here to find out how I became this way, so that you never become me. David,” he murmured, leaning forward, “can’t you tell I know you’re lying to me?”

“I’m not lying.”

“You _are_ lying. I’m not an idiot.” He pushed himself from the throne, one brow lifted. The way he stood felt so silently menacing that David tensed instinctively. “You lie the same way as I do. Looking away, saying things over again, not paying attention the first time.”

David’s fingers began to feel numb, and the nerves beneath his neck and at his jaw began to ache. He wasn’t aware of doing anything of the sort. Was it possible he could be doing all of that without even noticing? Or maybe Legion was just bluffing. “I haven’t been doing _any_ of those things.”

“I know.”

David’s stomach dropped. Several thoughts ran through his mind. First: that this was only a bluff. That Legion was only pretending that he knew David was lying, in an attempt to get him to admit that he _was._ Second: that maybe he really was a bad liar after all, and he had done something that had given himself away. Third: that maybe he really _had_ been looking away and saying things over again and not paying attention to Legion the first time, and Legion was only lying to him to test his reaction.

And fourth: that David hadn’t given anything away after all, and that Legion was lying just the same as David was right now… without batting an eye.

And that meant he was in trouble.

“Okay,” he said, his voice far less shaky than his quivering nerves. “You got me. I’m lying.”

Legion shifted where he stood. The candles flickered for an instant, and David knew this was his opening. In a split second, he made his decision, gathering every bit of his concentration into his mind and sending a piercing wave straight at him. He was right - Legion was unprepared, and his mind, for that moment, was soft and vulnerable. David drove straight into it, penetrating every thought he ran into on his way toward the center. Flashes flew by too quickly for him to process: golden waves of light and blinding gunfire and rolling mist against his ankles and sparks of lightning; anger and pleasure and pride and stifling anxiety and dull vacancy; burning flesh and ferric blood and dry dust; screams that rang in his ears and ran circles through his mind and drowned out every other sound. Everything seemed unfamiliar, seemed different, seemed foreign. The pride, the gluttony for power, the absence of humanity: none of this was David.

 _No!_ he injected into Legion’s mind, _we’re not the same!_

And then, like last time, he felt a sudden force ram against his mind, but he was ready this time, diving down, away, drilling through concrete conceptions and leaving a trail of hollow burning notions in their wake. He wanted to tear Legion’s thoughts apart before he was forced out - to sabotage him so that he couldn’t fight back. The joke was on him: the very feeling of Legion’s mind, hot on his tail, sent him ripping into ideas with enough vigour to shred a stone building to pieces.

Another bump to his mind. This time, he veered away and pulled back from the center, yanking his mind back. He wouldn’t allow Legion to oust him when he could do it himself. He shook his head, returning to where he stood, and immediately drew up an invisible wall between them.

Legion staggered back, raising a hand to his forehead. He was watching David now with a gaze so intensely infuriated that David could almost feel its heat on his skin. “You have the same weaknesses as I do, David,” he growled. “Don’t think you can defeat me that easily.” He lifted his hand.

An invisible force slammed into David’s chest, and he flew back. Before he could hit the wall, he disappeared, reappearing behind Legion. He slammed his hand into the side of Legion’s head and sent a deluge of muting pain into his mind. Legion cried out, twisting and whirling to face him, and suddenly David was pinned to the wall. He tried to pull his arms away, but found they were stuck fast, as though a rope were holding them back.

“You’re ambitious,” Legion said. His gaze looked distant now as it settled on David, not quite there. Probably the after-effects of David’s rifling. “But not ambitious enough to possess the strength to kill me like you want.”

Again, David tried to tug himself out of his invisible bonds. Again, he couldn’t move. He could only struggle as Legion came toward him, looking vulnerable without a shirt to cover his body and absolutely dangerous. Maybe he would kill him quickly, with a snap of his neck. Maybe he would kill him slowly, and torture him the same way he had tortured Oliver, with holes drilled into his thighs and knees and stomach. Nothing of his fate was clear at the moment, but he did know one thing: he could _never_ fight without a shirt on.

“I really hoped you’d see my side of things.” The candles by Legion’s feet flickered, and their light became brighter. He beckoned one up, floating it just shy of David’s cheek, so that David had to squint to look past the light. “I really, truly think you would have succeeded under me. You might even have surpassed me.” He smirked. His eyes were still slightly unfocused. “But if all you’re going to do is kill me… I can’t have that. No one is allowed to kill me in _my_ world.” A pause. “... Our world.”

“It’s only you,” David breathes, pressing his head back against the wall.

“No.” Frowning, Legion lowered his head, pressing a finger to his temple. “No, it’s not. I’ve _told_ you…” He trailed off, shutting his eyes and sighing. That was it.

Silence stretched between them. David watched as Legion stood, swaying slightly on his feet. He seemed to be focusing on something in his mind, but David could feel nothing shimmering in the air. When he reached his mind out to taste the atmosphere around Legion’s mind, he could detect the faintest disarray and bitterness. It wasn’t unfamiliar to him. In fact, it was more familiar to him than he liked. Uncomfortably familiar. His thoughts felt sluggish in the same way, sometimes, usually after something happened that he didn’t want to think about. That he couldn’t deal with. Losing King when he was eleven. Philly leaving when they’d had their last fight. Waking up in the hospital after he had tried to hang himself. Torturing Oliver when he thought he was Farouk. A thousand other times in between. It was a way for him to leave the world, to ignore everything around him, just for a while. Just until he felt good enough to come back.

He curled his fingers and felt the unnatural pressure still holding his wrists against the wall, and the candle still hovered in the air. Legion’s mental disconnection didn’t seem to affect his powers. Still, David kept his mind open, waiting for any possible moment for his guard to drop.

Eventually, Legion broke the silence. His voice was soft, and his words were slow and sluggish and sounded wearied. “Do you want to meet them?”

David waited for a moment for him to say something else, or to finally look up. Nothing happened. Legion stayed in that same position, eyes shut, and David stayed in his position, not the least of which because he couldn’t exactly _move_ at the moment. “All your lackies? Your followers?”

“You could... call them that.” With some effort, Legion lifted his head, looking off toward the wall next to David’s head. His expression was no longer distant as much as it was vacant. Empty. Not just not there, but nonexistent, like it had _never_ been there, even though David knew that was absurd. “They’re just as much of me as they are of you.”

David frowned. He spread his senses nearer to Legion. Nothing had shifted yet, but the moment it did, he would be ready. Something had to change sooner or later. Every time his own mind had wandered, it had weakened, had separated - had detached itself from everything. It meant his powers had to disconnect, too. They couldn’t hold themselves on their own unless he sat in the driver’s seat. Even a millisecond’s-worth of distraction broke the union between power and consciousness. “Nothing here is a part of me except myself.”

Legion didn’t answer. He shut his eyes again, his chest moving slowly, rhythmically. David was reminded of himself again, and of the many times his drifting head had forced him to stop thinking.

But it didn’t last long. Something rippled in the air. It was just barely strong enough for David to sense, but he noticed it. And he seized the opportunity immediately, sending his mind out to envelop Legion’s and spearing it through at all sides. He met no resistance, and struck something so solid that he knew he had him.

With a cry, Legion staggered back, tripping over his feet and toppling down. In the same moment, the weight of David’s invisible shackles vanished. He called his power inwards and disappeared, twisting himself several hundred feet away, near one of the empty buildings at the northeast of the camp.

For a long few moments, everything was still.

This was the first time he had been out after dark in this future, and if it weren’t for the bright moonlight, the darkness would have swallowed him whole. But when he looked up into the sky, he could see stars. Those, at least, hadn’t changed.

Then the darkness seemed to recoil, as an explosion lit the top of the hill and bright fireballs shot up and out to the sides. They landed on the grass and lit the ground on fire, devouring everything in its path and spreading slowly across the ground. David began to move back, away from the hill and towards the wall on the other side of the buildings.

The light from the explosion parted, and then, a moment later, Legion came shooting out up. He hovered above the licking flames, arms outstretched, and David felt his nerves begin to bubble in his stomach.

“That’s not how I wanted my greeting to go!” he cried. He sounded furious, agitated, ready to bite David’s head off. “Come on, David! You’re really that stupid that you don’t know who I am? Figures you don’t - if you didn’t recognise yourself, you definitely wouldn’t recognise any of us.”

He didn’t sound a bit like himself. Not that David knew very much about who Legion _was,_ apparently, all things considering. But he had encountered a lot of weird things in his life, and he was pretty certain he could pick out some huge shift in attitude when he encountered one.

“You’re Legion,” he replied, walking backward, away from him.

“Ugh.” His future self threw an arm out, and one of the fallen poles near David shot up into the air. “Unlike Divad, _I_ hate that name. And so does David!” He threw his hand out, and the pole came pinwheeling straight toward David.

The move was too slow, and David had plenty of time to raise his hand and deflect it. It shot past him and slammed to the ground. “What are you _talking_ about?” In the back of his mind, he recognised the names, but the spark was faint.

“All this ‘you deserve it, you’re both delusional!’ bullshit!” Legion vanished, reappearing in the same moment on top of the building David was standing by. “You want to know why I hate that name? Because it reminds me that I’ll _never_ have full control. That those two birdbrained _idiots_ can still take my place if they tried hard enough! They don’t deserve it. Not when they don’t know left from right.”

Down on the ground, David stepped away from the building. He wasn’t entirely certain what Legion meant, but he was beginning to have an idea of what had happened - and he didn’t like it. “You’re not David?”

“Jesus Christ - didn’t you _just_ hear me say how ‘David and I’ both hate the name Legion? No. No, you’ve met me before. I bet he’s right there with you, too.” He strode to the edge of the building and stepped off, floating smoothly down to the ground. “I’m Dvd. You _know…_ I’m the one who doesn’t think you need anybody. Ring a bell?”

_I told you - why didn’t you listen?_

“But - no,” David muttered, “he’s with _me._ He’s - he’s in _here.”_ He lifted a hand to the side of his head, like that would protect his own Dvd from this future one. “He’s not out there. How can he be there if he’s in my head?”

Future Dvd snorted coldly. “It’s like you’ve forgotten that we’re you.”

“He can’t do that.” Dvd couldn’t take him over like that. He was someone in his mind - he was just a _voice,_ just someone who gave him opinions every so often, no matter whether or not David wanted to hear them. He was the bug in David’s ear, the devil on his shoulder. He wasn’t a parasite looking to take him over.

This time, Future Dvd laughed, and it was cruel and resentful and carried a discontented lilt toward the end. His lip curled. “I’m done. I’m tired of this. If you don’t believe me, then fine. But don’t come crying to me once I actually punch it through your thick skull who I really am. Who _we_ really are.” With one quick sweep of his arm, he lit the ground in front of David’s feet on fire.

David lurched back, stumbling over his feet. He brought his balance back with a quick nudge of telekinesis. A split second later, he was on top of the building Future Dvd had just been standing on, his arm outstretched and his skin crackling with light. “I have a better idea,” he called out - sounding much braver than he felt - as Future Dvd spun around to face him. “How about you just let me go back to the past without killing me? Then I’d be out of your hair, back in my time, and you’d never see me again.”

“I see you every day!” Future Dvd howled. He threw his arm out, sending a raging fireball straight towards David. This time, David stopped it in midair, swinging it back toward Future Dvd, who smothered the flames before it reached him. As it fizzled out, Future Dvd rose into the air. In his hand grew another ball of flame, this time smaller than the last, but hotter: its flames were pale, and going on blue.

In a beat, the ball of flames was shooting straight toward David. He knew he couldn’t deflect that one, so he disappeared, only milliseconds before it struck where he used to be. He reappears behind a building, the skin of his face still smarting from the heat.

“Come out, David,” Future Dvd taunted. “You know it’s better to get this over with fast. I’m doing you a favour.”

David would have laughed, if he wasn’t busy planning out his next move. Again, he teleported, this time to a wide open space in the middle of the camp. He stretched a hand out and reached for Future Dvd, freezing him where he stood. “You’re not doing me any favours by killing me. Is that what you thought you were doing for everyone you killed here? Cause that’s a really shitty favour, taking people’s lives when they still want them.”

Future Dvd stared back at him, frozen and unable to respond. David was near enough that he could tell there were a million thoughts running through his mind. Luckily, he didn’t have to hear any of them.

That was more like it. If he had known it would be this easy, he would have frozen Legion in the first place. Scoffing, he stepped forward. “Come on. Somewhere inside, deep, deep down inside yourself, there _has_ to be a part of you that agrees with me about this. That it’s wrong. That you shouldn’t be doing this. That you made mistakes and now you’re paying the consequences.” He tilted his head. “Come on. Another version of yourself, coming all the way out here… seeing all this destruction… and telling you it’s wrong. That he doesn’t agree with you. That’s gotta hurt.”

Future Dvd’s eyes flashed. In the same moment, David felt his mind push back against the freeze, gently at first, and then more forcefully. He managed to hold on for several seconds, shoving against Future Dvd’s mind, before the strength of his pure rage overpowered him and drove his mind back. Before he could react, Future Dvd had wrapped his mind around his, squeezing so tightly that David’s head felt like it might explode.

David pulled his mind in, just enough so that he could vanish on top of another, smaller hut. He shook off Future Dvd’s mind, throwing a field around himself to deter any attacks.

“Another version of myself isn’t talking to me,” Future Dvd said, rolling his shoulders as he turned to face him. “Give me a break, David. You’re only as good as your best.”

“I _am_ my best.” With that, David shot a bolt of lightning at Future Dvd.

It struck him through the chest, sending him flying back several feet. He hit the ground hard, rolling to a stop several feet away. There he laid, groaning and writhing in pain.

When he didn’t get back up, David materialised next to him. Up close, he could see a large hole in Future Dvd’s breast, just beneath the collar, from where the charge had struck him, ringed with black. Several smaller holes dotted his skin, but only this one was large enough to seem lethal. A tiny wisp of smoke curled its way up from the wound, and the smell of burnt skin was terrible enough that David wrinkled his nose and leaned away. _That_ was why he would always wear a shirt when he fought.

Future Dvd was still alive, though, breathing shallowly, trying to move himself away from David. He didn’t get far before he had to stop to regain his strength, staring up at David crossly. “You took me by surprise,” he grumbled, though he sounded almost proud of the fact that David had gained the upper hand.

David knelt beside him. “I don’t want to kill you.”

Future Dvd rested his head on the ground. Weakly, he pulled his arm up to his chest, covering his charred wounds. “Don’t you? Waste your time killing me - think you’re saving the world, when really, you’re not. This world doesn’t need saving, kid.”

“Maybe not. But you do.”

“Look who’s talking.” Future Dvd let out a weak snicker. “Says the guy who can’t even learn his powers enough to kill Farouk the first time.”

That wasn’t fair. “Future Syd was the one who warned me about this future. If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have changed paths. I’ve already been saved. You never had a chance.”

“Whatever helps you sleep at night, David.” With a wry grin, Future Dvd turned his head to the side and shut his eyes. David could feel his consciousness begin to evaporate. “But remember… if I don’t stand a chance here… then neither do you.”

David stood, his expression twisting in a grimace. “I’ll find my own way back. I don’t need you.” He turned away, stretching his mind across the camp. The fire at the top of the hill burned brightly behind him; enough that he could see his way around the buildings and tents.

Ignoring his obvious knowledge that there were dead bodies lying around where he could see them, David made his way around the buildings, over to the wall. He reached out to place his palm on it, and found that it was cool in temperature. Probably metallic.

A moment later, before he knew what was happening, his head slammed against it. Pain shot straight through his brain, and he forgot all control in his limbs and slid down to the ground. For a moment, the pain was so bad that he couldn’t see anything but white and black, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but grip at his head. This felt worse than a psychic attack. And not just because the side of his head throbbed.

Unfortunately, the psychic attack came next.

A very sharp thought, shielded by a lining meant to dull David’s senses, slid in the back door, straight through his brain. He tried to pull his defenses up, but the intruding thought expanded, enveloping his own and trapping him. He knew he was on the ground, but his body felt far off, as though he were existing suddenly elsewhere, only vaguely aware of himself. He had felt this way before, many times, but never as a result of an attack. Always a result of his stress, his nerves, his unwillingness to exist with his thoughts.

Future Dvd approached him, clicking his tongue. The wound David had given him was gone. When he spoke, his voice sounded far off. “First rule of fighting a telepath: don’t let your guard down.”

Somewhere inside his left ear, the voices began to whisper. _He’s got a point._

It was difficult to think. “How… did you…”

“We have a healer.”

_Oh, great._

“What…?”

“A _healer.”_ Future Dvd stopped at his side, looking over him, his arms behind his back. A mischievous grin curled his lip, and David faintly considered whether this was Dvd or someone else. “Someone who makes sure I don’t die before I’m supposed to. Fortunately for me, I have all the power in this world, so I’m never going to die.” He prodded his toes into David’s side. “Unfortunately for _you,_ you’re the only other person here who has any kind of power. That’s not good for you. It means you stand in the way of my potential.”

The voices grew in volume, muttering words David couldn’t make out. He blinked, and suddenly, Divad and Dvd were crouching at his other side, leaning against each other. Dvd looked angry, and Divad just disappointed. Or maybe he looked pleased by this turn of events. David never could figure out which was which, when it came to him.

“You should’ve let us handle this weeks ago,” Divad said with a smirk. “Everything he’s told you - he’s right, you know. About him being Legion and Dvd. And me.”

“No,” David murmured, just under his breath. “No. Shut up.” He turned his head away, looking back at Legion. “In your way…? I… just want to get back _home.”_

“Oh, no, David, that’s where you’re wrong. See, a few weeks ago, when you were in my mind, trying to get a taste of everything I had to offer, _I_ was in your head, getting the same stuff out of you. Everything that happened since Future Syd kidnapped you in the orb, and all her instructions to help Farouk find his body so you could stop the maybe-apocalypse. Here’s a secret: he never needed your help finding his body. He found it just fine in _my_ timeline, without any of my help. She lied to you. She didn’t actually care about you. Just like she didn’t care about _me.”_ Future Dvd’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Just like she _doesn’t_ care about me.”

“Don’t say anything else,” Divad warned. “He doesn’t need to know how you feel about it.”

“Doesn’t…” Despite Divad’s words, David didn’t know where Future Dvd was going with this. At the moment, he didn’t particularly care. All he wanted was to close his eyes and ignore everything until his head stopped pounding and his thoughts stopped clouding over. “She’s not… here.”

“She has to be, if she somehow contacted you.” Again, Future Dvd prodded him with his foot. “She didn’t really think that one through. Oh well. I’ll deal with her once I’m done with you. Because you know what else I found, when we were in each other’s heads? I found that you had the potential to destroy me, if it came to it.”

David groaned softly. “But you said -”

“I know what I said,” he snapped, shoving his toe into David’s side. It hurt. “I know what I said! That you’re not powerful enough. And you’re _not._ I said you have the _potential_ to destroy me. That’s why I offered to let you learn your powers. Not so that you could kill me, but so that I could send you off to your past and watch you use everything you learned from me to come to the same conclusion. But you decided you were just too _good_ for that. David, when will you learn? There’s no such thing as good and no such thing as bad. Only people.”

“You’re not… good… killing people isn’t good.”

“I did what I had to do when I saw that none of them listened to me. And instead of leaving me alone and letting me live my life, they sent their tanks and their bombs and their mutant-decimating contraptions to try and stop me. They should’ve known none of that would work. There’s nothing in this world that can kill me.” He stared down at David. “Except myself.”

“That’s me,” Dvd growled. Beside him, Divad stood, shaking his head.

The voices grew ever louder, until all David could hear were harsh whispers and angry hisses, taunting something outside of himself. The pain started up again, this time pulsing at his temples and blackening the edges of his gaze. Then he felt his body rise from the air. Dazed, he just managed to spot Future Dvd, several feet away from him, reaching his arm out toward him. He was the one doing this. He was the one closing a tight pressure around David’s throat that cut off his air and made it hard to breathe. He was the one who shoved David back into the wall. Through all of it, David couldn’t do a thing about it, no matter how much he wanted to. He couldn’t move his limbs, couldn’t _feel_ them.

And then something sparked in the back of his mind. It ran down his mind, through his arms and his legs, and settled inside him as though someone had poured cement into his body.

It was the last thing he remembered before he lost consciousness.


	3. We Can Pick Sides, But This Is Us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> David wakes up in a very unfamiliar place, and meets some very unexpected people.

His head felt heavy. An ache ran behind his eyes and through his temples. His fingers didn’t quite feel there, as though they had been disconnected from his body entirely, and his muscles didn’t feel quite like they should ache as much as they did. His face felt as though he had been wearing a frown and grin simultaneously, so he relaxed those muscles and blinked until he felt the restlessness trickle down his cheeks and pool beneath his jaw, where he could ignore them for the time being. These weren’t feelings he was unfamiliar with. In fact, he remembered feeling like this multiple times, and all of those times had been followed by the same confusion he felt now: glancing around some unfamiliar place, still trying to settle into his own consciousness - his own body.

He was standing in the middle of a room with dark walls and a dark floor and a dark ceiling with no light fixture and long tables that lined the edges. On the outsides of the tables were chairs: two at each table. Eight chairs total. All were empty. In fact, he noticed, the entire room was empty, save for himself. And he had no idea what he was doing in this room by himself, or how he had gotten here. All he knew was, time _had_ passed, though he wasn’t sure how much, or what had happened while he was out.

Last he remembered, he had been on the verge of death because of Legion himself - or Future Dvd, or whoever he seemed to be at the time. Did it matter, in the end, who Legion was? Did it really matter whether or not he was being controlled by Dvd or Divad or any other voice in his mind, when they all seemed to want to kill him?

No. They all wanted him dead. They were all equally guilty. And if it was just Legion playing a trick on him, forcing him to remember all of the ways his friends and therapists had thought he was _sick_ all his life, then he was all the more guilty. As guilty as the rest of them.

He looked down at himself. He wasn’t wearing the same clothing he’d been wearing before. No more normal shirt and pants and boots. Now, he wore a curiously dark-coloured sleeveless jacket, loose around his sides, a shirt that barely met his hips, and long pants that covered dark shoes. Even though he could barely see in the room, he knew they weren’t his boots because of how bare his ankles felt when he rolled them. Flat shoes, by the feel of them, which weren’t his favourite. But he was smart enough not to complain about them. He could always be wearing only shoes, or no socks at all.

On his wrist, he spotted, was a pure white wristband, thick and all in one piece, all the way around. He raised his arm, checking all sides of it for some way to get it off. As far as he could tell, there wasn’t so much as a crack in it, nor a place he could break it off at.

He suddenly thought of his life, back in his lower twenties, when he had been sent to the hospital for the first time. There, he’d had a wristband too, although it was thin and flimsy and had all sorts of information about him written on it. His name, his age, his reason for being there, his patient number. This wristband had no writing on it and no designs. It was blank, but it was solid.

If this was some sort of information carrier, he had to break it.

He made his way to the nearest table, hitting the bracelet against the table. It made a solid noise against the surface and bumped against his wrist bone, but nothing else happened.

He hit it against the table again. This time, the bracelet let out several shrill beeps, and the lines that ringed the outside lit up, like it was warning whoever was tracking him that he had tried to take it off.

_“Oh_ \- no.” That wasn’t what he wanted. He drew his arm back quickly, flipping his wrist over and running his thumb along its surface, feeling for anything that could stop the beeping, that could turn it off so that nobody would come for him. When nothing yielded, he made his around the room to the door, searching for a button, or a screen, or anything that would let him out of here. But the walls were empty, devoid of everything but the lights that circled the corners that joined together the walls and ceiling. He couldn’t even grab anything to climb on to reach the ceiling.

Fine. He’d do it the hard way.

Shutting his eyes, he extended his mind outward to feel around. Or he tried to, anyways, but it didn’t work: in an instant, his mind came screaming back, paining him to the point of blindness and worsening the headache he already had. Every beep of his bracelet sounded like alarms in his head. Panicked and taken off guard, he tried to teleport himself out of the room.

Nothing happened. Something was blocking him from using his powers.

Which meant he really _was_ trapped in here.

He let out a breath and leaned against the wall, pressing the heel of his palm into his temple. Someone had to have trapped him here. It had to be Legion. It _had_ to be. He was the last person he’d come into contact with, and judging by the way the fight had tilted in Legion’s favour by the end of it, David hadn’t won the battle. And this tracker was probably something Legion had put on his wrist to track him after inevitably locking him up in this place.

The beeping stopped.

He stood in silence, staring down at the wristband, checking inside and out for a hint as to who the wristband had alerted and why it had stopped making that god-awful sound in the first place. Nothing.

Shaking his head, he lowered himself to the floor, curling up face-first and resting his forearms on the ground and lowering his head into his hands. His head was still killing him, and if he had no painkillers or powers here, then this was the third best thing he could do.

He stayed in the same position for several minutes, until he heard the door slide gently open. Even then, he didn’t move from his spot on the floor. He didn’t look up, didn’t move his hand from his forehead. If he could have read Legion’s mind, he would have in a heartbeat. Instead, his head felt stifled, his powers muted, his body restless and tense. “The easiest thing you could’ve done,” he muttered, “would have been to kill me quick, because I guarantee you I’m going to make your life a living hell until you let me go. And everyone else’s lives too - whoever’s inside your head.”

For a moment, there was nothing but silence. He heard the light tapping of shoes on the floor, shuffling to move away from the door, but not committed to coming very near him.

Then came a tentative, yet familiar, voice: “I… I came to check on you. Your bracelet went off.”

_“Cary?”_ Forgetting his headache, David looked up.

Sure enough, there was the scientist he had grown so fond of. His clothing looked different: a dark grey shirt, frayed at the sleeves and the hem - like it was the only thing he had worn for months - and dark trousers, and dark shoes. He wore a grey jacket, unzipped, and David realised it must be part of a suit. Despite the difference, Cary was unmistakable in the way he stood, both hands raised and resting near his chest so that his fingers could play together. He did that, David had learned back at Summerland, because it was a way for him to control his nerves, whenever they got to him, which hadn’t surprised David, considering he was obviously a nervous person on the outside. He was watching David worriedly, and the lines the creased his forehead and the corners of his mouth gave away that he was years older.

“They sent me up,” Cary said, taking a step nearer. “They thought maybe… you’d like to talk, now.” The way he spoke, it sounded like he was afraid David would lash out at him.

“What does that mean?” Suddenly aware of his surroundings, David stood, one finger pressed to his temple as he tried to ignore his headache. “What do you mean, ‘talk’? Who’s ‘they’? Where am I?”

The creases at Cary’s forehead deepened. “Can’t you remember?”

“If I remembered, I wouldn’t have asked.” This was more confusing than he wanted it to be. “Where’s Legion? How did I get here?”

Cary considered the question, wringing his hands together. “I don’t know whether your fight with Legion has had any adverse effects on you… I’ll have to check your stats, make sure your bracelet wasn’t ringing because there’s something wrong -”

“No!” David shouted, exasperated. Cary flinched visibly, but he didn’t care. “I hit it on the table trying to get it off. I’m not _dying._ Is this - is this taking my vitals right now?”

“Yes - yes, it’s - what’s the last thing you remember?”

His head hurt, his patience was running thin, Cary hadn’t answered most of his questions, and he still didn’t know _where_ he was. This was getting old. “Stop changing the subject and answer my questions! Where’s Legion?”

Cary tensed, stepping back. He reached out to a table next to him. “He’s - he got away from you. During the fight.”

“I was about to die during that fight.” He may as well answer Cary’s question now. “Last thing I remember, he attacked my mind and tried to strangle me to death with his powers.”

Cary said nothing, simply watching David for a long moment with a thoughtful look on his face. The moment drew on for so long that David felt half a mind to turn away and start feeling up the walls for some way out of here, just so he didn’t have to endure the unsettling stare. But before he could move, Cary’s entire expression shifted, his uncertainty twisting into realisation and fascination.

“Of course. Of _course._ I should have recognised it from the start. You don’t remember because you have what _he_ has. You just must not know it.” He stepped forward eagerly. “Who is this right now? Who’s talking to me?”

David couldn’t make heads or tails of what Cary meant by the question, and quite frankly, he was tired of it. “I’m David. If you’re asking me this because you think I’m Legion or something -”

“No, no, no. No, David, it’s _you.”_ Cary straightened his back proudly, looking so relieved at his discovery that David thought he might rush at him and hug him. “I thought this whole time the _other_ one was you. No wonder he seemed so irritated when we called him David: we were calling him by the wrong _name.”_

Huffing, David threw his arms out and let them fall back down to his sides. “Okay, are you going to explain what’s going on here? Or do you expect me to just _know?_ I can’t read your mind right now.”

“Yes - yes, I’ll tell you everything.” Cary stepped backwards toward the door. He motioned for David to follow. “You came from the past, David, from a specific point in time. I haven’t figured out just when, but there are things you learned in _this_ timeline that you haven’t learned in _your_ timeline.”

David made his way to the door, maintaining several feet between them, just in case. “Yeah, I figured that out,” he muttered, as Cary pressed his hand against the bare wall. This still wasn’t getting anywhere. “Legion told me. This is the timeline where I kill Farouk, turn against everyone, and destroy the world.” He paused, thinking back to what Legion had told him at the camp in India. About how he wasn’t Legion, but Dvd. About how ‘David and I both hate the name Legion.’ “And something about having a lot of people in his head.”

“Exactly. _Exactly._ He’s figured that out, but you haven’t. That’s why you’re so confused.”

Cary looked so excited about it that David almost felt guilty for the wave of impatient fury that flooded through his chest and welled in his throat. This was exactly what they would have said in his past, too - that he was sick. That he didn’t know what he was yet. That he was _unwell._ “What do you mean, he’s _‘figured that out?!’_ I don’t _have_ people in my head. There’s nothing for me to figure out.” He stepped forward, and Cary, a stricken mass of apprehension, mirrored the step backwards. “Don’t call me sick.”

“I-I’m not!” Cary stuttered. “David, I’m not calling you sick -”

“It sure sounds like it to me!” He sneered. “‘Oh, David, Legion’s figured everything out and you haven’t! You have people in your head!’ Just shut up, just _shut up._ I don’t need this right now. What I need is for you to explain to me what the _hell_ I’m doing here and what this place is. I don’t even know where I am. You can at _least_ afford to tell me things that make sense before you start pushing exactly what past you pushed at me before!”

The doors slid open to reveal an elevator, lit by the same ambient purple light as the room was. Cary frantically made his way inside, moving to the back and pressing against it. His gaze, full of panic, never left David. “Okay, David,” he said, his voice wavering. “Okay. Just… follow me, and I’ll show you where you are.”

David took a moment to collect himself before following Cary into the elevator. Next to the door were rows of buttons with numbers on them, two across and three down. Below all of them was another button, ringed in a pinkish light. An emergency button, he assumed.

As the doors shut and the elevator began to move, he thought of all the places he would rather be than here. In the darkness of an abandoned Summerland. Standing in the middle of an abandoned field, wondering whether or not Legion would find him. Lying on the ground, feeling like a smashed sack of potatoes, waiting to die. Anywhere but here, in this elevator, somewhere in the midst of a post-apocalyptic world caused by his future self, standing next to some future version of Cary who wanted to tell him he knew more about his mind that he knew about it himself. Not only that, but he was _stuck_ here, unable to use his powers, forced to feel nothing more than human for who knew how long.

The elevator stopped, and again, the doors opened, revealed a long stretch of hallway. This, at least, had white walls and lights that actually worked to make things visible. David felt a tingle of relief in his chest.

Cary led the way. David followed, glancing into the rooms. They all looked the same as the room he had been in: dimly lit, and all four corners dark. Not all of them were the same size. In some rooms, he saw nobody at all: in others, much to his surprise, he saw groups of people, chattering over drinks and lounging across chairs and couches. He couldn’t make out any of the conversation, but he knew they must be talking about him. This world was boring. David had disrupted everything. They _had_ to be talking about him.

Self-conscious now, he followed Cary halfway down the end of the hall, until they turned down an open area reached a wide room, much larger than the one David had been kept in. Tables lined the floor in rows, and a large wall separated one section of the chamber from the other. Where there should have been windows to the outside, there were sectioned panels of glass, beyond which were various images: the inside of an abandoned office, several dozen feet under the sea, a city from a thousand feet off the ground. If David had to guess, this was a cafeteria of sorts. A place where everyone could gather and talk.

“Please,” Cary said, and David blinked himself out of his confused wonder. He gestured to a table. “Sit. Sit down. I’ll go get the others.”

David sat. There were a few scattered people here, but none that he could recognise. They recognised _him,_ though, given the way that they stared. He looked away.

After a minute, Cary returned. Behind him were Clark and Syd. Clark looked the same as he always did, which didn’t surprise him: he’d probably never change, in _any_ timeline. Syd still wore the same ragged robes that she had been wearing when he had met her in the orb and the sensory deprivation tank. Her left arm was still missing, and David couldn’t help glancing down at it. He felt a pang in his chest, an uncertain conglomerate of guilt and pity and worry - and _relief,_ too, that she was here and that Legion hadn’t somehow gotten his hands on her in the time it took him to get here.

They each pulled a chair up to the table. David sat up straighter. The few people who were here had stopped what they were doing completely and were now watching them. David couldn’t read their minds, but he could feel their eyes on him, and made it a point not to look in their direction, in case they thought he was reading them.

“So,” Clark said, _“David._ You’re back. Well, not _back,_ the way you’d probably put it, but you’re here. Great. Saw you met your lookalike out there. Good stuff, isn’t he?”

“Not really,” David muttered, knowing full well it was a rhetorical question. “He tried to kill me.”

“And he would have, too, if we hadn’t found you when we did. Or - not _you,_ per se.” Clark waved vaguely in David’s direction. “The other you.”

Cary shifted in his seat. He reached over, placing his hand over Clark’s arm in warning. “Clark, let’s not mention that right now. What David wants to know right now is where he is and why he’s here. He’s having a little… issue right now with remembering what happened after the battle.”

Syd and Cary exchanged looks, but Clark kept his eyes on David. He watched him for so long that David began to feel his spine itch. In the moment, he wanted nothing more than to use his powers and dig right into what he was thinking. Something about the subtle serenity in Clark’s eyes told David that he wasn’t as cautious around him as he used to be.

Finally, Clark blinked, glancing away. “All right. I’m sure that can happen with time travel.” He didn’t sound sincere. Or maybe, David’s impression coloured his attitude.

“We’re underground, somewhere off the coast of Scotland,” Syd chimed in. She leaned forward, resting her forearm across the table and looking down at her splayed fingers. “We came here around three years ago, after Legion destroyed the Divisions and most of our soldiers. He doesn’t know we’re here. He thinks we’re dead.” She paused, rethinking her words. “He _used_ to think we were dead, before we came and got you.”

“Actually,” David said, “he might have read my mind and figured that out… _before_ you came. Which surprised me. I thought he could sense everyone in the world at the same time.”

Clark scoffed. “Is that what he told you? Huh. He’s a bigger box of rocks than I thought he was. Nope. As far as we know, his power is limited to a couple thousand miles. Two, maybe two and a half. I’m going to say it probably covers the diameter of America. Enough that he knows where everyone is in America at any one time. But not the world.”

David frowned. Given that, it still meant that Legion was stronger than him, for all he knew, but not as strong as he made himself out to be. That was good. “He told me everyone loved him.” A small itch started on the inside of his throat, but he ignored it. It hit too close to what he was doing, he realised. But he _deserved_ that love, at least. Legion didn’t. “He said everyone came after him, even though he wasn’t doing anything that warranted anyone coming after him.”

“He lied.” Syd curled her fingers into her palm and looked up at him, and he saw the fervor in her eyes. “How do you think he made everyone love him?”

The itch in David’s throat grew stronger. He swallowed, looking down at Syd’s shoulder and the ripped fabric that rested against her skin. In his own timeline, he hadn’t _made_ anyone love him. He had helped them. He helped with their issues, in their minds, or their bodies, or their personal lives, and in return, they stayed with him. They kept the home warm, and they loved each other. That was the way of the world: everyone learning to live together peacefully.

But he wanted to know, and so, after a moment, he bit. “How?”

“He used his powers. He went into their minds, twisted them up, and forced them to believe that they loved him.”

“An extremely powerful telepath with the ability to do just about anything,” Clark said, leaning back in his chair. “I would argue he becomes even more unstable the more powers he discovers he has. Which is impressive, because he was already unstable _before_ he killed Farouk.”

David raised a brow at him. “I’m not unstable.”

“Huh. Yeah. I forgot, you’re in that timeline where Farouk’s _not_ dead.”

“How much about my timeline do you know?”

“We know bits and pieces,” Cary answered, before Clark could open his mouth and chime in with another stupid remark. “Syd’s been filling us in. We know she visited you, tried to stop this future from happening. And we know it worked… but not in the way we thought it would.”

A memory flashed across David’s mind: not an image, but a distant, yet very loud, scream. Amy’s scream. “Yeah. I bet it didn’t.” He dropped his hands to his lap and pressed his nails into his palms. The pain helped distract him. “People died. Everyone’s against me. You’re all against me.”

Syd frowned. “Not us. We’re here to help you.”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Because if we weren’t on your side,” Syd said, leaning forward, “then we wouldn’t have rescued you from Legion or kept you alive once we brought you here.”

“Kept me _alive?”_

“We might have had to… _detain_ you for a while,” Cary said, looking as though he hated where this conversation was turning.

_“Detain_ me? What are you talking about? I wasn’t awake. I didn’t -” And then he remembered how Cary had seemed to adamant about David being someone _else._ Again, his temper spiked. “Oh, no. No, no, no. Don’t start telling me I’m sick again. I’m fine. I’m doing fine.”

“We’re not accusing you of anything, David.” Syd’s voice glided across the table, smoothing over his irritation like thin honey: sticky and fluid, but not enough to quell everything inside. “It’s about what we learned about Legion. About what we know.”

David still doubted they knew what they were talking about. They used technology to study Legion, but no one could predict human nature. No one knew him better than himself. “How do you know you have it right?”

Clark sighed audibly. He ran a hand across his face. _“Because,_ David, we’ve had a few more years under different circumstances to really get to know Legion and his powers and his behaviour. Maybe you’re fine denying everything that’s happening to you like it’s really going to turn out all right for you in the end, but we’ve been over here putting in the work, trying to get to know Legion. You want to know why? Because we know that stepping one foot outside when we don’t know anything is going to get us killed. Maybe tortured. So excuse us if it seems like we’re pushing this in your face, because we are. Do you want to end up like him?”

Taken aback, David managed to grumble out a, “No.”

“Then listen to us. Because if you don’t, you’re going to end up just like him. And you’ll be stuck here, because you’ll inevitably decide that whatever we have to say to you isn’t worth it, and then he’ll find you, and he’ll kill you, because contrary to what you believe, he _does_ actually know himself better than you do at this point. So you can sit here and listen to what we have to say, or you can get up and leave and probably die a horrible death.” He tilted his head back, rolling his neck and shutting his eyes.

Beside him, Syd had focused back down at her hand. She moved it off the table and looked at Cary, who had seemed to decide that grimacing and looking at a chair nearby was better than making himself visible in the argument. He looked like he wanted to disappear.

That gaze gave David pause. Clark still lingered on his nerves, but none of them looked like they were lying. Uncomfortable, maybe, but not lying. He might not know, at the moment, whether they were, but he still felt the tug of longing inside him to be loved, to be known, to be _understood._ If Cary and Clark and Syd understood him here, then it was a far cry better than the Cary and Clark and Syd that existed in his own timeline.

He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbing his fingers over his forehead. “Okay. I’ll listen. Can I just… do you have, like, a spare room or something? It’s been a really long day, and I feel like I’d listen better if I got some sleep.”

“Yes - we cleared out a room for you, David.” Cary stood, clearly relieved that David was finally listening. “I’ll show you. It’s just down the hall.”

David stood, as did the rest. All three of them followed Cary through the halls. Most turns led down more long stretches of hallway, each as dark as the other. Sometimes, they would pass openings that spread into large chambers, which, in the moment, David didn’t bother looking much into. None of them spoke a word, and David was grateful for that. He was already beginning to feel his headache coming on again, and he didn’t want anybody around him until it left.

Finally, they turned down another lengthy hallway, this one with a dead end. They made it the entire way before stopping at the very last door. Clark pushed the door open, and, after a moment, David stepped inside.

An ambient light pulsed softly at the top edge of the walls, the colours slowly melting and changing. It fell over the room, brushing over the tops of cabinets, a desk, and a bed, the headboard of which was pressed up against the wall. Although the area wasn’t large by any means, the lack of furniture provided plenty of empty space to move around in.

“Tell us if you need anything, or if this isn’t ideal for you,” Cary said.

“No.” David stepped farther into the room, glancing around at the black walls, awash in gentle teal light. It didn’t seem quite real. “This is fine. I just need a bed.” He turned back toward the door.

Syd stood at the doorway, while Clark and Cary looked on from behind her. “Get some rest.” Her voice was firm, but no less gentle than it ever was in the past, and when she smiled, it was filled with a familiar consideration that made his eyes prickle with tears. “You look like you need it.”

“Yeah.” He rubbed at an eye and sat tentatively at the foot of his bed, which seemed to withdraw inward on itself when he looked at it. When he touched it, he found that it hadn’t moved in the slightest. “Yeah, I kind of do. My head still feels like it’s been hit by a truck.”

“Telepathy does that.” She didn’t sound unkind. “I’m sure an attack by Legion does even worse.”

Quite abruptly, a memory came to David’s mind, of Syd lying unconscious on the desert floor, a dried trail of blood down the side of her head, and his hand over her forehead, fingers curling as he suppressed any memories she had of the past several days: just enough so that she would stop causing him issue and love him again, like she should have. That wasn’t an attack, no matter what Syd _or_ Farouk had to say about it. That was only an attempt to curb her rage, to buy him enough time to figure out what had happened with her mind, and to hide it from everyone else in the meantime. Even so, a sudden paranoia twisted his stomach, that everyone knew what he had done. That _Syd_ knew what he had done, and only said that to get back at him.

“It’s horrible,” he muttered, shaking the thoughts from his head - lightly, lest he make his pain worse, “knowing that Legion is out there, more powerful than me, and that I can’t beat him.”

“That’s why we want you here. So you can learn.” She stepped back. “Don’t think about it right now. Get some rest.”

“Okay.”

“We’ll see you later.”

He pressed his lips together, kicking off his boots after they left and crawling onto the bed. It was comfortable, but the blankets were cool to the touch, so he crawled beneath them to warm them up. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the light change from yellow to orange to red.

It was dim enough that, when he shut his eyes, all he could see was the darkness of his eyelids. No sense of whether it was night or day above ground. At the moment, he didn’t care. His head still ached, and he wanted to sleep for however long it took for the ache to subside. He could worry about jet lag later.

* * *

_“Do you want to know what I’ve figured out?” Dvd asked, in a tone that suggested he was about to blame either Divad or someone else._

_David laid in the bed in his childhood bedroom, watching the wall as the stars from his lamp ran across the drapes and the desk and the ceiling. The soft creaking of the rotating lampshade was the only thing he could hear, save the occasional sound of Dvd rocking his chair back and forth near the foot of his bed. It rolled back, then paused, the rolled forward and back again, then paused. Repeat. “Not really.” He watched a star slip from the curtains to the hard wall._

_“I’ve figured out,” Dvd continued, ignoring him, “that everyone wants to tell us we’re sick. Not just the people in our timeline, but the ones here, too. Our mind, sick. Because, what - these powers?”_

_David frowned, blinking his focus back and looking toward him. “Do you want to know what they keep mentioning?”_

_Dvd raised his brow._

_“They keep mentioning something about ‘the other me.’ Cary said it when he met with me. And then Clark said it too. Why?” He knew assuming Dvd had the answer was probably unreasonable, but he couldn’t help the feeling that he wasn’t saying everything on his mind. “Like they’re talking about someone else that’s not Legion.”_

_Out of the corner of his eye, David watched as Dvd pushed himself off the chair, letting it roll back as he stretched his fingers at his sides. “‘He knows this,’” Dvd said mockingly, rolling his eyes, “‘he knows that, Legion’s smarter than you, Legion knows more than you.’ I told you. Trust none of them.”_

_“I know. You say that all the time, okay? I get it.” He sighed into his pillow. “But… I think they want to help.”_

_“Why? So they can use you to kill Legion, and then kill you afterwards so you don’t go back and repeat your past mistakes?”_

_“They’re not going to kill me later.”_

_Dvd scoffed. “How do you know?”_

_David frowned. “I don’t. But they don’t seem like that type. If they wanted to kill me, they would have done it already. They put this… this_ bracelet _on me.” He lifted his arm out of the covers. In his mind, there was nothing on his wrist, but he wrapped his fingers around it anyways, as though to show Dvd what he meant. “White, kind of thick. I tried to break it, but it went off, and that’s when Cary came up to check on me.”_

_“See? They’re trying to keep tabs on you.” Clicking his tongue, Dvd paced across the room, coming to a stop next to the window to face him. “And you don’t think they’re suspicious of you?”_

_The anger was beginning to wear on David. “Why should I?” he asked, his voice dispassionate._

_Dvd lifted his brows, staring at David. “Because none of us can trust anybody in this world except ourselves.”_

_“They don’t give me a bad feeling, okay? Just… let me talk to them.”_

_Dvd grunted. He shook his head, giving David a harsh look before turning away, making his way toward the door. “I don’t know what you expect from any of this.”_

_“Maybe they can help us beat Legion somehow.”_

_“You don’t need anyone to help you out.”_

_In a sudden fit of irritation, David shoved himself up onto his knees, yanking the covers away and grabbing a pillow and throwing it at Dvd’s back. “I almost died fighting him! You and Divad were there! I didn’t forget that!”_

_Dvd whirled around, snatching up the pillow and tossing behind him furiously. It hit the poster board behind him, knocking it down with a loud thump. “We helped you!”_

_“You didn’t help anything! If I want help from someone other than you and him, then I’ll get it!”_

_Dvd glowered. “Why?!”_

_“Because they might know something you don’t know!” With a loud groan, David dropped himself back down onto the bed, pulling the blanket up to his ear and slamming the remaining pillow over his head. “Stop yelling! I’m sick of it!”_

_“You’re the one that threw the pillow at me!”_

_“And I’ll do it again if you don’t shut up!”_

_Dvd didn’t respond._

_Silence reigned for what felt like half a minute, during which David tried to force himself back to sleep. It was a difficult task, considering he was too aware of Dvd in the room to even think about falling unconscious. He wasn’t even tired. Just tired of Dvd rambling on._

_Then: “Fine. See what they tell you. But it’s going to be wrong.”_

_David sighed. “You don’t know that.”_

_“I know we don’t need any of them.”_

_“You keep saying that, but as long as we keep almost dying, that’s a lie. Simple as that.”_

_“They’re going to betray you.”_

_“Shut up.”_

_Silence._

_David let out another sigh, pulling the end of the pillow in front of his face._

* * *

David sat with his arm rested on the table, squinting down at his bracelet. His fingers felt disconnected, and he couldn’t entirely move his body for at least half a second after he opened his eyes. His head, again, felt foggier than usual.

_“Shit,”_ he murmured. Even his words felt distance, like he wasn’t really saying them. At least for now, his headache had gone away. More than likely, he just couldn’t notice it in his current state, which was, by all means, a complete muted mental disaster. He felt much like he did when he had first woken up in the underground hideaway. Time had passed, but he wasn’t certain how much that was.

“Hey. You okay?” Beside him, Syd adjusted herself, leaning her elbow against the table and tilting her head down so that she could have a better look at him.

He hadn’t realised she was there. He turned his head so that she was in the corner of his eye and blinked owlishly, unable to bring himself to do much else at the moment.

“Are you still feeling bad?”

“Kind of.” He grimaced. “I thought I went to sleep. Why am I here?”

Syd drew in a breath, like she had just realised something. “Who is this?”

“Uh… David. Why are you…” Though sluggish, his mind worked well enough that he remember Cary asking him the same question after he had woken up earlier. “Why do you all keep asking me who you’re talking to?”

“I was talking to someone else just a few minutes ago, before you… before he started to get dizzy. What’s the last thing you remember?”

David paused. He was too tired to ask what she was talking about, so he skipped right to the question. “You and Cary and Clark showed me to my room, because my head was hurting and I needed a nap. And then I went to sleep, and… now I’m here.” Sitting down. He looked down at himself. He didn’t remember waking up, or getting up, or coming here. “What did you mean, you were ‘talking to someone else’?”

Syd didn’t say anything for a moment. She frowned faintly, her lips pressed into a thin line. “I mean I was talking to you. But it wasn’t you.”

“What, you mean like a - like a clone?”

“No. Something else. It has to do with…” She shook her head. “No. I think I need to let Cary explain it to you. He understands what I’m trying to tell you better.”

That made it seem like she was about to reveal something terribly heavy to him, and he had a feeling it _was,_ undoubtedly, something heavy. “Is this about what Cary tried to tell me earlier? You weren’t there, but when he came up to that room I was in, when I first woke up, he said something about how Legion figured out he had people in his head. And then, when I was fighting him…”

Syd pushed her chair back and stood. “I’m going to go get Cary, okay? You stay here.”

David nodded, leaning back in his chair and running a hand over his face. He listened as her footsteps faded, and, after a pause, finally took the time to glance around the chamber he was in. It was sizeable, with a ceiling that reached at least thirty feet in height. In the center, nearly above him, several streaks of warm, orange light branched out from a single point and running across the ceiling to the walls, and behind him, the entire wall was covered in panelled projections. Unlike the cafeteria, these panels showed a single, connected image of a forest that reminded David of Summerland. Maybe it _was_ Summerland, and someone had chosen to have it there just to make David feel more at home.

He glanced at his table, which seemed to be the only table in the room. To his left and his right sat long couches, pillows scattered across the cushions. They looked old and faded, worn with years of use, despite the fact that David hadn’t seen very many people around. Surely, it couldn’t have been from the people in this hideout. There weren’t enough to even properly fill the rooms, as far as he knew. Not that he could check with his powers at the moment.

After several minutes had passed, Cary and Syd returned to the lounge. Cary settled a cushion away from David, while Syd perched herself at the other end.

“How are you feeling?” Cary asked.

David made a face, lifting a hand up to run his fingers through his hair. He could feel them more now, at least. “Could be better.”

Cary glanced back at Syd. They seemed to exchange a silent look between themselves, before he turned back to look at David. “Sydney tells me you… woke up while she was there with you.”

“Yeah. I slept in my bed for a while, I guess, and now I’m here.” David’s gaze flickered around the room. “How did I get here?”

Both were silent.

“What?” He looked between the two. The nerves had begun leaping in his stomach and prickling at his palms. “Why are you looking at me like that? Did someone move me or something?”

Cary took a deep breath, as though he were steeling himself to say something. “David,” he said, slowly, “it’s been almost a full week since we showed you to your room.”

“A - what? A _week?”_ That changed things, as much as it shocked him that he couldn’t remember how much time had passed. He couldn’t remember ever waking up from it. “What did you… did you drug me?”

“No… no, David.” Cary’s brow furrowed, creases wrinkling his forehead. “Do you remember when I told you that Legion has things figured out?”

“Yeah.”

“It has to do with your mind.”

This conversation was already draining David’s energy; he was beginning to suspect where Cary was coming from, and what he was about to mention. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t still try to avoid it. “He has the powers figured out. I got that.”

“Not just the powers. The… the people, too.”

There it was. There was the topic David had tried avoiding, even as it pressed the obvious into his mind. There was the one thing he apparently didn’t understand about himself, according to everyone in this future. Even Legion himself agreed on that much, what with his telling David that he was a _they._

But he’d bite. If they were all so adamant on telling him that there were other people in his mind, he’d bite. “Just… start from the beginning. Tell me - well, first of all, tell me clearly, how you’re still alive, because I didn’t get that from all your fast explanations. And then tell how you found me, how I got here, and who you’re talking about when you say you were talking to someone else.”

Cary shifted on couch. “When Legion became too powerful - when we couldn’t stop him - we went into hiding. Clark, Sydney, and I, the Vermillion, a few soldiers from Division Three. We found a way to keep Legion from detecting us.” Cary gestured to the room. “There’s a signal. I made it myself. I figured out how to block the psychic brain waves so that his powers don’t work around this area. Or, perhaps I should say, they _work,_ but as far as he’s aware, there’s no one here.”

“Is that why my powers don’t work? Because _his_ powers aren’t effective here?”

“Yes and no. It’s why your powers don’t work on the _outside._ As for the inside… that tracker on your wrist is what’s currently stopping them.” He gestured to the bracelet around David’s wrist. “As long as it’s around there, your powers are inaccessible.”

David scoffed. “Oh, great. Okay. Thanks for cutting off my powers.”

“You turned dangerous when you got here,” Syd commented, leaning over the back of the couch to peer at him solemnly from around Cary. “We had to.”

“Yeah? Well I’m not dangerous now, so when are you going to take it off?”

“Soon, David,” Cary continued. “It’s important I tell you the rest of the story first. Less confusion.” Cary offered him a reassuring smile. “Judging by how much you know about Legion and this future, I’m going to guess you’ve been in the future for a while.”

“It’s been -”

“It doesn’t matter,” Cary cut in. “What matters is, we didn’t know you were here. Not until your fight with Legion. You say the last thing you remember is Legion trying to strangle you. Well, when _we_ got there, you were having some sort of battle with him in your mind. It turns out, that bought us just enough time to capture you and bring you back here safe. We tried to strike Legion down when he wasn’t paying attention, but he’s too powerful. He’s still out there. But _you_ \- we brought you back here.”

“Wait. I don’t remember anyone else there during the battle.” This didn’t make any sense. “It was just me and Legion.”

Cary grimaced, looking down at his hands for a long moment. “This is the part that’s going to be hard to explain. David, you were still awake. You were still aware of everything. You just weren’t… yourself.”

David frowned. He could still remember when Farouk had controlled him, back at Summerland, and convinced him to rescue Amy. But he _remembered_ that. There wasn’t a moment when he wasn’t conscious and aware. “So, what, are you saying I was possessed?”

“No!” Cary cried quickly. “No, that’s not what I mean at all. It’s not like that. More like… this... _presence,_ who took you over, was protecting you. From your thoughts, from something you couldn’t handle. Back there, he was protecting you from Legion.”

“I could have handled Legion just fine! I didn’t need protection.” David sat up straighter, agitated by Cary’s adamance. “It was probably just my _powers_ or something. Maybe they work when I’m unconscious. Maybe that’s one of my powers.”

Cary moved as well, slowly moving himself an inch away from David. “Well… that’s where you’d be wrong.” He hesitated, as though he didn’t want to say what he was about to say. “We brought you - who we thought was you - back. And he talked to us, even though he never told us his name. I never thought to ask. He was very different from you, David, but, seeing as you were from a different timeline in the past, we weren’t sure whether he was someone else or if you had changed in some way we didn’t realise. We thought you had somehow…” He paused, rethinking his words. “And then he got angry. He thought we were capturing him, and that we thought he was Legion, and he tried to attack us. Hence why you’re here, in this room, unable to use your powers.”

“And…” David took a breath. The claim seemed terribly wild and out of line. “You’re expecting me to believe that?”

Cary offered him a pitying smile. “I know it’s hard for you to believe, but it’s the truth.”

David let out an exasperated breath, looking around the room, at the dim lights, and the empty chairs, at the door - anywhere but at Cary. He was right: that David had needed to be protected from Legion. He hadn’t been in the right state of mind to fight, after that slam to the wall his head had taken, after the mental lock, after the fog had rolled into his brain. But he didn’t need to make up some ridiculous story, either.

Still, something in the back of David’s mind told him Cary knew more than he was giving him credit for. He turned back to look at him. “If you’re telling the truth, then how do you know all this about me?”

“I’ve spent years researching Legion,” Cary answered, in his nervous-but-calm way that made him sound slightly uncertain to anyone who didn’t know him. “His identity is fragmented. He has people inside his mind who are protecting him too. Different identities, different parts of his mind that manifest into… _people,_ who, at some time or another, take him over. We’ve found two so far.”

David felt a sudden sense of dread spread through his palms, crawling into his fingers and up the bottoms of his arms and creeping across the back of his neck. He thought of Dvd and Divad - of Future Dvd and his insistence that he was different. That _he_ didn’t like the name Legion. The whole fact that he was calling himself Dvd instead of David was strange. “What are their names?”

“We’ve never learned them. But we have noticed that there’s a shift. He doesn’t act consistently with himself.”

“How do you know he’s not just angry at the world for trying to kill him?” The words weighed heavily on David’s tongue, stale with futility. The longer Cary went on, the less motivation his own argument seemed to have, and the more he began to consider that Future Dvd was right, which wasn’t exactly what he wanted to do. Admitting Future Dvd was right apparently meant admitting that there was something wrong with his brain. Admitting that there was something wrong with his brain meant admitting all of his friends in the past were right. Admitting all of his friends in the past were right meant admitting he was wrong.

“His behavioural patterns tend to vary,” Cary answered. “And I mean huge behavioural shifts. We’ve found that David - the David inside Legion - acts much like you do. If he thinks there’s something he needs to consider, he second guesses himself. He spent a lot of his conscious life in his body, and… well, you know the details. The other two were difficult to nail down at first, but in the past year, we’ve figured them out. The one you were fighting has an immense hold over his powers, and he does _not_ back down from anything he perceives as a challenge. As for the other, he’s… less destructive. More of a listener, but not so much that he changes his way. He still has his qualms, but I’ve found that he focuses more on the mind than David or the other. Which, in a way, is a good thing for us.”

David raised his hands to his face and shut his eyes, trying desperately to call a voice to his mind. Any voice at all. _Either_ of their voices, just so he could confirm whether or not what Cary jabbered so eagerly about coincided with his situation. But, as he expected, no voices started in his head. They had to pick now to be stubborn pricks who left him alone. Perfect.

“When Legion fought me in that camp,” he muttered, dragging his hands down his face, “I think he might have had one of those personality shifts.” It was half a lie to introduce his awareness. He _knew_ he’d had a personality shift - he just hadn’t known it was a shift. Even so, dread crept into his fingers. “I tried to attack his mind, but he came after me, and - we’d talked before, but this time, he sounded… different.” He paused. The dread shot through his palms. He shut his fingers into fists. “He _told_ me he did. He told me he was someone else, and that I should recognise him.”

Cary leaned forward. “And did you?”

Not ready to answer yet, David slid off the couch and stood. He rolled his neck, then made his way over to the couch at the other side of the table, running his fingers along its fabric. Through it all, Cary maintained his silence, only standing after David did. Syd stood a few seconds later, moving behind the couch and resting her hand on the back. They both kept several feet away: a comfortable distance for them all.

Finally, after David had sufficiently steeled his nerve and pressed stars into his eyes, he answered. “Yeah, I did. I know both the… _identities_ you’re talking about.” It felt strange to call them identities. Almost wrong. David had never considered them to be real, but talking about them out loud like this, he suddenly yearned to call them something more real. “They have names. The angry one is Dvd. The calmer one is Divad.”

Cary took a step closer. When David looked at him, he could see fascination glowing in his eyes. He reminded David of a child who had just been been told he was going to Disney World. “This is - this is very surprising news, David. You’re aware of them.”

“In my mind, yeah. It’s complicated.” For the life of him, he didn’t want to talk about the first time he had truly _met_ them: shocked out of consciousness by a bullet countering a bullet, with a gun pointed straight between his eyes. “It was Dvd who asked me if I recognised him. I didn’t know they could… just take me over like that. I didn’t believe it.”

“It can be disorienting for everyone. For you especially.” Cary stepped forward. “But I think you have to learn. In order to make things easier on yourself, you have to learn to know who they are. Otherwise, you’ll never learn to defeat Legion on your own.”

“But I don’t need to defeat him on my own. I won’t be.” David looked from Cary to Syd. She was watching him with a serious expression, and not a hint of a smile on her face. She never smiled. “You’ll help me. You’ll be helping me, right?”

“As much as we can,” Syd answered, inclining her chin in a nod. “But there’s only so much we can do. He’s powerful, David. We’re no match for him. Only you are.”

Legion had told him the same. That he had the potential of defeating him, if it came to it. David could, by all means, become just as powerful as he was, because they possessed the same powers, the same mind - the same people in their minds, who, so far, they seemed to be causing issue for David.

Which brought him to another point. “Does that mean I was being taken over by one of my… identities, before I woke up here?”

“He woke up a few hours after you went to sleep,” Syd said, making her way around the couch. “He didn’t say anything to us. We thought you were exploring, so we let you be. And then… I found him sitting here, looking at that.” She nodded to the trees on the wall. “I thought I’d talk to you. I didn’t know it was him. Not until he started to stare and zone out. And then, you finally came to.”

As much as he knew that his inability to remember what he happened when he wasn’t in control wasn’t his fault, he still felt regret for it. He still wanted to _know_ what had happened with his own body. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right - it wasn’t _normal._ Shaking his head, David stepped to the side of the other couch, perching on the arm. “Do you know who it was?”

Syd frowned faintly. “I think he was the other one. The one who wasn’t in control when we found you.” At David’s blank stare, she continued. “He was… relaxed. Willing to speak to me.”

He knew immediately who it was. “Divad.” It couldn’t have been Dvd, or else he wouldn’t have spoken to her at all. David had no doubt in his mind that Dvd shared the same distaste toward _this_ Syd as he did toward the Syd in their timeline. “He’s the one who likes to talk.” He was the one who told David he was sick - that he was _crazy_ \- just as much as their old friends did. David’s jaw tightened. “He didn’t say anything bad, right?”

“No. He talked about what he thought of this place. The windows are a nice touch, apparently.”

That made him laugh. Then he was slammed with a feeling of self-consciousness, that it wasn’t him who had told her the windows were a nice touch. He looked down at his hands, turning them palm up. His gaze moved to the device around his wrist. “Am I ever going to get this off?”

“When you’re ready,” Cary answered.

That wasn’t much of an answer, considering he hadn’t wanted his powers stripped in the first place. “Ready for what?”

“To train.”

“Well,” David said, sliding off the arm of the couch and standing straight, “I’m ready for anything that lets me get my powers back, so…”

Cary’s gaze fell on the tracker for a second before he looked back up at David. “We haven’t quite got it set up yet. We weren’t expecting you here… at all, really. But we’ve been working on it. It’ll be all set up in a few hours, hopefully.”

“Anything.”

Cary smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry, David. We’ll get this figured out.”


	4. And I'll Love the World Like I Should

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time for David to do the work.

“You ready to get this off?” Clark took David’s raised wrist, his gaze down at the device. When he pressed his thumb along the edge, the lines lit up, a brighter white than the metal surrounding it.

“I’ve been ready,” was David’s relieved answer.

They stood in the center of a large training area. David knew it was a training area because that was _exactly_ what Cary had called it when they had come down here. He could also tell by the four giant cranes that hung from the ceiling, connected by tracks that ran from wall to wall, the various piles of discarded armour and weapons that lay strewn against the walls, and the entire other section of the area, the center of which resided three curved rods that poked out of the floor and pointed in on each other. They formed a circle, and it reminded David of the field Division Three and his friends had trapped him in during the trial.

Even so, it was a welcome change compared to the rest of the hideout. The walls in this room were lighter: a moderate grey against the dark walls he had already grown used to. Harsh white light shone from light fixtures on the ceiling. Chips littered the walls - likely where weapons and armour with bodies inside had collided. The very sight made David’s arms itch, but the last thing he would do was back down from this.

A few feet away stood a control room, circled all the way around with glass walls that let him easily see inside. Panels pressed against the glass in every direction, and it reminded David of the way the inside of Cary’s lab had looked, back at Summerland. These were smaller, less complex, and Cary could work on one panel with one hand while he fiddled with another panel with the other.

Cary and Syd had already made their way inside, but Clark had stayed back for the moment.

David returned his attention back to the tracker, watching as Clark slid his thumb across its surface. It flickered several times, went dark for two seconds, then came back on with a long beep.

“There we go,” Clark said, as the bracelet split apart for him to pull over David’s hand.

The instant it was off, David felt a rush in his mind, as though a heavy blanket had been tugged off of his thoughts and left them both exposed and free. He staggered a step back, raising his hands to his head and pressing the heels of his palms to his temples.

Clark tilted his head, turning away and stepping toward the strong, glass room Cary was in. “All reset? You okay?”

“Yeah,” David said quickly, running his fingers through his hair and taking several long, deep breaths to ground himself. “I’m fine. I’m okay.” Another breath. As the shock left him, he could feel the hum of his powers grow stronger in his mind, tapping at his consciousness to remind him that they were there and ready to be used however he wished.

And use them he would. He shut his eyes and threw his mind out, mapping out the entire complex in less than a second, counting just how many people were alive, and coming right back to where he stood so that he could ground himself with his newfound knowledge. He hadn’t realised just how much those psychic outlines of his surroundings grounded him until he had lost them. Now, he felt more composed than ever.

He opened his eyes. Clark had withdrawn into the room Cary and Syd were in. From behind the glass, David could see them chatting to each other and glancing into the training room, though he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Nerves began to prickle at his collarbone, so he glanced away, stretching his ankles and pacing in his place, until he couldn’t stand it and broke out of his line to make his way toward one of the large metal cranes. Each claw stood at least six feet tall and one foot wide, and the closer he got, the larger it seemed to loom over him. He reached out to run his fingers along its chipped surface, worn away from years of use. A small dent rested in the side of one of the claws, curving it inward and leaving the outside with a sharp edge.

David grimaced, pulling his hand back. “Am I supposed to train with these?” he called back toward the room, uncertain if they could even hear him.

Cary leaned forward, reaching out to tamper with something near the sill of the glass. After a moment, a loud screech sounded from the walls, fading out with a few crackles. “Yes,” came Cary’s voice, loudly, from speakers David hadn’t known were there. “They’re designed to help you train for Legion’s physical attacks. Now, could you move back to the center, please?”

David stepped away from the crane, walking backwards toward the control room. “What are you going to do, hit me with them? They look like they could kill me.”

“That’s not what we’re aiming for. We’re trying to heighten your reflexes, make you quicker when it comes to dodging.”

“I can dodge fine.” That wasn’t the entire truth, but he couldn’t let Cary think he was completely useless. “I’ve had plenty of buildings and fire thrown at me since I got here. I’m not dead yet.”

“That wasn’t the worst he could do.”

“What does that mean?” David turned back to look into the little control room. Syd had her arms crossed, her shoulder against the glass, her head leaned to the side as she watched Cary press on buttons and flick switches. Clark had sat himself in a chair. His cane stood in front of his knees, and he had his fingers wrapped around it. He was watching David now, a pensive, yet solemn, expression on his face.

“It means,” said Cary, looking up as David reached the glass, “Legion held out on you. His powers are much stronger than he showed you.”

“He was going _easy_ on me?”

“In a way… yes. I think he was trying to hide his powers, so that you couldn’t see the full extent of them. Could you step away from the glass, please? Right where the line is.”

“What was the point?” David looked down, walking back until his boots touched the line that ringed the control room, several feet away. “If he was going to kill me, he could’ve just done it with his full powers. It’s not like I had anyone to report back to.”

“I’m not so sure he _was_ trying to kill you. That’s how we were able to subdue him long enough to get you. Turn around, please. I’m about to start them up.”

David did as he was told, turning his back on the glass and facing the cranes. The fact that Legion had been going _easy_ on him rubbed him the wrong way, not the least of which because he had been able to _beat_ David so easily. It made the taunts and reminders that David was weaker even more frustrating.

A soft whirring started up in the floor and the ceiling and the walls, and David’s attention shifted back to the training chamber. The cranes shifted, with a loud _thump,_ as though they hadn’t been used for a long time, and then the claws began to part and rise up, until they jutted out straight from the center, several feet from the ground. He had only begun to wonder how they would manage to hit him if all he had to do was duck before the arm lowered, bringing the straightened claws down to align with his knees.

He glanced around at the three other claws surrounding the control room. They, too, had adjusted themselves into formation: claws pointed straight out, low to the ground, ready to slice off the head of whoever it was up against.

The speakers crackled again. “Okay, David. Are you ready?”

No. No, he wasn’t ready. “Uh, Cary?” He stepped along the line, moving as far from the closest crane as he could. “I don’t know if you know this, but I don’t actually want to die.”

“You won’t die,” came Clark’s voice over the intercom, sounding somewhat unclear and distant. When David glanced back, he found him leaning over, speaking loudly toward Cary and the microphone. “Worst that will happen will be a few broken bones, maybe a collapsed kidney. You’re okay with those, right?”

“No.”

“Great!” Clark grinned at him through the glass and leaned back again. He had a smug gleam in his eye that made David went to leap at the glass and claw it right off his face.

Cary leaned into the microphone again. “Don’t worry, David. I’ve set them on the easiest level, for now. Our goal is to build up. Harder comes later. Now - get ready.”

David took a deep breath, flattening his irritation toward Clark with a sigh. He looked at Syd. She had pushed herself from the glass and now stood facing him, her gaze on the cranes. When she finally glanced at him, he saw worry in her eyes. It didn’t help his own nerves, which were beginning to bubble up from his stomach and into his chest now. His brow twitched in a frown, and he tilted his head in an attempt to ask her, silently, if he would be all right. She only smiled reassuringly and nodded her head at the crane a few feet away.

In the moment it took for him to turn back and focus his attention on the crane, it moved to the side, along the track in the ceiling. Soon enough, it came rocketing toward him. He just managed to leap out of the way, staggering to regain his footing before he fell. But it didn’t offer him a moment of respite. Before he had time to breathe, another claw shot toward him. He dodged, but didn’t manage to move completely out of the way. The edge of a claw slammed into him, sending him staggering back into the glass of the control room.

He slid down to his side, nursing his aching elbow. “Did you say this is on the _easiest_ setting?”

“David, you have to concentrate.” Syd’s voice. “You have powers. You have to learn how to react. Focus.”

He groaned, but slowly pushed himself back to his feet. “This is _not_ what I signed up for when I said I wanted to train.”

The cranes hadn’t stopped while he was down. They kept moving, racing along their tracks and turning and hurtling in other directions. They couldn’t reach him behind the line, so he kept back for the moment, tracking their movement patterns, trying to learn the way they ran before he leapt back in.

Almost instantly, the cranes came charging back at him. One dropped lower, pointed its claws back down, and twisted so that it could shoot out toward him, as though it were trying to trap him.

But he had powers. He had powers, and he could easily dodge them - Syd had reminded him of that. He took a breath, vanishing from his spot a millisecond before the crane reached him and reappearing on the other side of the glass control room. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Syd and Cary and Clark glance around wildly until they spotted him again.

He wanted to gloat about how he could _handle_ it, but at that precise moment, a crane came knocking into him from behind, shoving him off his feet and right onto his face.

The speakers crackled on again. “Right,” Cary said, “there are four of them. Not just one.”

“Thanks,” David groaned, sitting up on his knees and pressing his palms together to stop the harsh sting. “I’ll remember that next time.”

He stood again, readying himself. When the next crane came, he disappeared and reappeared behind it, far from the others, buying him just enough time to plan where to appear again. This distance was short, so he only faintly felt the uncomfortable twist of nausea in his stomach each time he teleported. Again and again, he dodged and disappeared, he leapt and lingered, got knocked down again and got back up.

The fourth time he slammed into the glass, he stayed down, out of breath. “Can we take… a break?” he panted, sitting up.

He saw Cary flip a switch. A second later, the whirring in the ceiling and the walls began to die down, and the cranes slowed and stopped, claws relaxing as they powered off. “That’s enough for now,” Cary said. “How’s your mind?”

“Fine,” David replied. “Why?”

“We have another test, if your mind’s not too…” Cary gestured to his own head, then pointed across the room, to the section that had the rods sticking out of the floor. “This one is designed to mimic the psychic attacks Legion could bombard you with. It’s not perfect… but it’s the closest to telepathy we can do.”

“Oh, yeah. Okay. Great.” David stood, making his way toward the rods. He didn’t hurry, because he wasn’t looking forward to it. But he wanted to. The more training he had, the faster he could get out of here and go home.

“Stand in the middle, please.”

David stepped between the rods. He crossed an arm over his abdomen, suddenly dreading what was about to happen. “What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to throw a few stimuli at your mind.” As Cary spoke, the rods began to come to life, each surface glowing a full, dark blue. Beneath David’s feet, the floor began to vibrate. “Things you’ve probably felt Legion do. I want you to use your powers to stop them.”

David swallowed, pulling his shoulders in and shutting his eyes. He had found that he focused much better when he couldn’t see anything. His thoughts felt sharper, and his powers felt closer. “Okay.”

The prodding didn’t start until several long moments later, but when it did, it happened fast: a dull little brush against his mind that startled him and made him lash out. It was a weak touch, so David was easily able to push it back, away from his mind. The next one was just as light, but it came from the other side. Again, David pushed it away, while he gathered his wits about him.

Several gentle nudges later, they stopped. He blinked his eyes open, glancing around. The three were still in the control room, the glass door shut, Cary peering over the buttons as he picked out what next to hit.

He was about to ask if they thought that was the worst Legion could do when it hit him. The barrage hit him fast, but it melted slowly around his mind. He could feel the edges oozing lethargy in a way that slowed his own powers as he tried to shove them back. Going against it hurt his mind, and the more he tried, the more the attack dug into him - into his scalp, into his head, into his _brain,_ without a single blink of respite. He didn’t know how to stop it. Didn’t know if he could _ever_ stop it, and it wasn’t letting up.

A scream began to bubble up from his chest. He could feel his thoughts bounce wildly in his panic, could feel his powers slipping from his control. Something in the room cracked loudly, and then, suddenly, a chilling blast of air ran over his skin. His scream lodged in his throat, cutting off his air and causing him to panic even more.

He stumbled forward, intending to run. Unfortunately, something blocked his way. Whatever he ran into felt as formless as it did solid: he felt his head crash through something freezing, only to it to be propelled back so hard he thought his neck might snap and forcing him to topple right over.

Blinking his eyes open, David glanced around. His vision blurred around the edges, and hardly focused, but he could see the blue field that spread from rod to rod, brightening and dimming with the steady stream of energy, swallowing him up entirely. It reminded him of the field Division Three had trapped him in during the trial.

“No -“ He coughed and sucked in another breath. This _was_ the trial. They knew what would happen - they knew he wouldn’t be able to handle what they threw at him, knew he would lose control of his powers, knew that they would have to trap him in this bubble. They had been _waiting._ That was it. They had been waiting for him to fall into frenzied despair, just so that they could rule him as out of his mind. Every timeline turned out the same: his friends turning on him. Comply or be terminated. “Let me out!” He stepped toward the edge of the bubble, reaching out with trembling fingers. Before he could touch it, he felt a shock, and yanked his arm back again. “Please!”

Through the field, he saw Syd coming toward him. “David.” Her voice sounded as though it were coming through water, muted and disorienting. “David?”

“Let me _out.”_ He moved back toward the center of the small bubble, crossing his arms tightly over his abdomen. His chest felt tight, and his breaths were short and quick. “Syd. Please.”

“It’s okay, David.” She stopped at the edge of the field. “David, it’s okay. We stopped it.”

“No it’s not. No it’s _not.”_ At any second, they would rule him guilty, rule him sick and unstable. They would fill his mind with that awful noise and incapacitate him so that he wouldn’t fight back. Maybe they would have mercy on him and knock him out before they actually killed him. He lifted a hand to his throat. Maybe they _wouldn’t_ have mercy on him, and would torture him before they let him go, the way he tortured Oliver when he’d thought he was Farouk.

He turned away from Syd, whirling to look through the bubble. If he squinted, he could see the long tables and chairs that lined them, the lasers, with their red-outlined barrels, pointed at him and ready to shoot, the screens in the walls that showed their charges against him: _98% chance of destroying the world._

“David, please. Look at me.”

Her voice pulled him back, and he glanced toward her again. Very suddenly, he saw her standing in the trial room back at Division Three, both arms intact, a cut at her lip, staring him down as she recounted every bad thing he had ever done to her: leaving her alone, going off to fight by himself, breaking his promises, wiping her memory, sneaking into her room at night. His palms prickled, and he took a step back. “No.”

Syd moved one step to the side. David’s eyes moved with her, but the image of Division Three only flickered in the background before returning again. “This field is here to protect you. Not hurt you.”

“You’re _lying!”_ The field was never here to protect him. It was here to stop his powers, so that they could be safe in the face of his powers. “You have to let me out. You _have_ to let me out.”

“I can’t. Not until you calm down.”

“Let me out!” His chest began to ache again, and he shut his eyes, focusing on pushing out with his powers, to break the field around him. It was stronger than the other, and pushed right back against his efforts, until his mind began to ache and he was forced to stop. Using telekinesis was like using his body, except all the pain and effort didn’t go into physical exertion, but instead into the very center of his head, until every thought he had made him hurt. He squeezed his eyes shut, raising his hands to his eyes and pressing them into his eyelids until he saw stars. He could feel the floor slipping, and knew the walls were slipping too, unreal and untouchable.

“Stop it,” she said sternly. “Look at me, David.”

He lowered his hands, waiting for the stars to pass, his breathing ragged. “You think I’m guilty.” His ears rang.

“No.” In an instant, Syd’s voice turned soft and soothing, and he looked up to see her gazing at him in the same way. “No, no, David. I don’t think you’re guilty. None of us think you’re guilty. That’s the last thing we want you to think.”

“Then why this?” He gestured weakly to the bubble.

“You were scared, David. When you’re scared, your powers go bad. But not you. You just need to calm down.”

David’s gaze moved to her face. His eyes had a hard time focusing. “But you - they, in the past - they said I needed to go back to therapy. And medication. And - a zombie, they said I should be a zombie again, and I _can’t_ -” His breath caught in his throat again, and he had to swallow it back down. He couldn’t go back to Clockworks for another six years. “I can’t do it again.”

“We’re not asking you to become a zombie.”

“But, _you_ -”

“I’m not her. I’m me, just like Legion isn’t you. I’m from this future, and Cary and Clark and I have all had time to figure out what’s been going on. And we know. You _do_ have other people in your mind, and that’s not a bad thing.” She pressed her lips into a thin line, smiling faintly. “It just means we can help you figure them out. We know about Divad and Dvd. We can help you.”

David’s eyes prickled painfully. He shook his head, reaching up to pinch at the bridge of his nose. Unable to think up the words to say, he stayed in that position, blinking quickly, silent, listening only to the sound of the energy field as it hummed around him.

Clark came limping up beside her, weight shifted heavily on his cane. “Everything okay here?”

“It’s getting there,” Syd answered, a firm - and obvious - tone to her voice. As if she were warning him not to say anything to shake down the steadiness David had begun to build.

“Well don’t let me ruin your fun.” Clark moved away from her, approaching the field. “As long as everything’s better.”

David squeezed his nose and let go with a sniff. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.” He still felt lightheaded, still felt the ground sliding beneath his boots, but he felt more grounded. He felt more _here,_ at least. He _wanted_ to be here, if they were here to help.

Very slowly, he began to calm. As he did, the energy bubble began to quiet, its buzzing becoming fainter and fainter, the field becoming lighter and lighter, until it disappeared completely, leaving him standing in the center of the rods again, holding his head in one hand.

Syd looked toward the control room. After a moment, she turned her attention back toward David, stepping forward until he was only a few feet away from him. “You okay now?”

Before he could respond, Cary came striding out of the control room. “I’m sorry, David, I am so - so sorry,” he stammered, as he made his way toward them. “I shouldn’t have pushed you to do this right after your physical training.”

“We made that decision,” Syd said, her gaze still on David. “Now we all know better.”

David smiled weakly. “It’s okay. I’m fine.”

Cary came closer. “How’s your head?”

“Hurts like a dick.”

Cary didn’t crack a smile. He only looked more regretful. “I’m sorry, David. But there’s nothing… hazy about your mind, right?” He frowned, thinking for a moment. “Whenever another identity comes to the front, the mind tends to feel hazy. The world tends to feel not quite there. Right?”

For a split second, David felt the urge to ask him how he knew. But he knew the only answered he’d get was that they had researched Legion for years, and they knew things David needed to accept. That was all the answer he needed, because he knew, in the back of his mind, that what Cary said was true. “Right.” He had felt his mind blur plenty of times in his life, only for him to wake somewhere else. More times than not, he had blamed it on bad memory, and after he had left Division Three, he’d thought it was his teleportation, but this seemed to be a solid discovery. “Everything feels fine.” He paused. Then, knowing it was the right thing to say, he added: “I’m still David.”

This time, Cary did smile, and it was filled with relief. “I’m not trying to make you think it’s a bad thing, whenever one of your identities takes over. In fact, it can be quite good. But when you’re fighting Legion, you won’t have time to wrestle with your mind. He knows how to use those shifts to his advantage. You have to learn the same.”

“I will.” David rubbed at his temple. “Eventually.”

From behind him came the sound of Clark’s cane tapping on the floor. “Well,” he sighed, “I think it’s time for a break.”

* * *

_“Nice lot of help you were,” David muttered, falling onto his back and staring up at the ceiling._

_“You seemed like you were doing better on your own, man.” The foot of the bed caved downward as Divad sat at the edge. He watched the blankets, running his fingers along the fabric. “And you weren’t exactly giving us any ins, there. Maybe if you stopped freaking out, me or Dvd could get in there and help you.”_

_“And do what? The exact same thing I was trying to do?” David lifted an arm straight up into the air, spreading his fingers out and tracing them with his eyes. “I tried to fight against it, but I couldn’t. It’s not like you could’ve done anything either.”_

_Divad laughed softly. “We look just like you in here, but that doesn’t mean we think like you.”_

_“Yeah, that much is obvious.”_

_“Which means, either one of us could’ve helped you stop freaking out. You have to learn to let us through.”_

_“I’ve been learning! They told me all about you, and now I have to live with it.” He wasn’t complaining about it. He was only aggravated that Divad seemed to be under the simple little impression that this wasn’t something big. That living like this was the best it could be. “I can’t even remember what you do.”_

_“Do you want to?”_

_David let out a breath. “Obviously.”_

_“Then work with us.”_

_“That’s what I’m doing!”_

_Divad pulled a face like he didn’t believe it, even though David knew they could sense each other’s emotions and the directions of each other’s thoughts._ “Are _you?”_

_“There’s only so much I can do when I’m trying to operate using my own consciousness, here.”_

_Divad scooted farther into the bed. He reached out and placed a hand over David’s ankle. “Listen. If we want to beat Legion, we’re going to have to work together. He’s already working with the future us. You need all three of us. You can’t do this alone.”_

_David wanted, so badly, to counter him, but he knew that he was right. Working alone either meant coming to a stalemate, like Dvd had before their friends had found him, or dying. Neither sounded like good options. “What happens if it doesn’t work?”_

_“Dude.” Divad grinned crookedly. “It’s going to work. Just stop doubting. What did I tell you about eggs?”_

_“I don’t want to hear that. Do_ not _start with that.”_

_“Then pay attention.”_

_David dropped his arm onto the bed. “Fine.”_

* * *

David sat in the makeshift cafeteria, both hands around a mug of coffee. He swirled the drink and stared down into it, watching as it lapped against the edges over and over again, making dark stains that faded as the coffee slid back down the glass. The third round of training had left him with an aching back and a bruised arm and, naturally, a pounding headache. But he was beginning to improve. The cranes weren’t sending him crashing into walls nearly as often as the first time, even though he still sometimes found himself sliding down the walls every few minutes. The mental attacks still bothered him, but he could at least control his powers enough to begin detecting what was coming at him half a second before it hit, which was, for the most part, just enough time for him to deflect it. They were making progress. Even Clark, who was always sceptical and stubbornly attached to watching David try and fail, had voiced his surprise at one point. That alone was enough to satisfy him.

“Hi.”

David looked up. Syd stood at the other side of his round little table, a cup of coffee in her hand, her lips pressed in a thin line. She wasn’t smiling, but he took it that way anyways and gave her a smile of his own. “Hey.”

“Are you waiting on someone? Or can I sit here?”

It took David only a moment to locate where Cary and Clark were. “Clark’s in his room, and Cary’s in his lab, probably working on God knows what. And everybody else looks at me like I’m carrying the black plague or something, so…”

Syd let out a breath that could have been a soft laugh. She settled down in the seat across from him, setting her own coffee down. “Sorry. Legion destroyed their cities and their homes and their families. I guess they think you look like him.”

“I do.”

“Mm… you don’t have his hair.”

David chuckled. “Or his sense of style. It’s pretty good, right?”

“Oh.” She shook her head. A faint smirk appeared at the corner of her lip. “No. It’s…”

That made him laugh. “Okay, I know. You don’t have to say it.” A frown began to appear on her forehead, and he was quick to backtrack. “I’m not reading your mind or anything. I just meant… I know what you mean. It’s…”

“Unique.”

“Yeah.”

She smiled faintly, tapping a finger absentmindedly on her cup. “I came here because I wanted to talk to you. About what we’ve found out about Legion.”

That caught his interest, and his attention. He hadn’t realised they had been researching Legion in the time since he had come here. They already had years’ worth of information, and they had David to work with. Nothing new could have come up in a few _weeks._ “What did you find? Is he… causing trouble?”

“No. I mean, not more trouble than he’s been causing.” She raised her brows. “Actually, Cary’s been studying psychic fields. Astral fields. Something like that. We think Legion might have done something to alter them.”

David frowned. “Altered the fields?” He leaned forward. “Wait, how do you even study them? Is someone here psychic?”

“No, but Cary has the technology to do it. I don’t know how he does it.” She shook her head, her gaze steady on him. “A few weeks before you got here, something threw them off. At the time, we didn’t know what the problem was. Then we found you, and we thought that you coming here had something to do with it. And ever since then, Cary’s been trying to figure out what caused it.”

A memory tugged at his consciousness, from months ago. Something Legion had said. David took a moment to fully grasp it. “Legion told me it was one of his powers. He said… he could time travel?”

“No,” Syd answered.

“He said he could take me back to my own timeline.”

“He was lying.”

“Okay.” David frowned. “Then what did you find out?”

“It wasn’t your fault. Not exactly.” Syd clicked her tongue, leaning back in her seat and sliding arm to one side of her cup. “Legion did it. It’s one of Legion’s powers. He must have sensed you when you got here and did something funny to the fields, I guess to stop you from travelling back in time.”

Why Legion would want to stop him from traveling back in time was beyond David: if they had the same powers, like Legion claimed, then he would know that David couldn’t do that himself. “But that’s not one of my powers. Travelling through time.”

Given the sudden surprise on Syd’s face, they apparently hadn’t thought of that. “Then I guess that’s not the reason.” She pulled her arm back, dropping her hand into her lap. “But he did something. He made it so that you couldn’t go back to the past. Maybe he thought you’d find someone who would help you get back to where you belonged. I don’t know. All I know is, he’s messed with time.”

“Oh.” That word suddenly jogged his memory. He had almost forgotten about Switch and her time-manipulating abilities. “I know. Legion wasn’t stopping me. He was stopping someone else. A friend - a mutant - who can control time. We thought coming here would be a good idea, but we got separated somehow. She didn’t make it here. I didn’t find her anywhere.”

Syd pressed her lips together and raised a brow. It took him a moment before he realised she was waiting for more of an explanation of who she was.

He shifted in his seat. “Her name is Switch. She’s… well, you know, I left Division Three, and then…” This was beginning to feel a little bit like an interrogation. Was she _jealous?_ “I found her a while later. Thought her time travel would come in handy. And then we hatched up this plan to come to the future, so I could see why Legion became this way. We originally planned on exploring together, but that obviously didn’t work out. And now I’m stuck.”

She continued to stare for another few moments, her gaze intense and scrutinising, like she was judging him on whether or not he really was telling the truth. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

Then she blinked and looked back down at her cup, and the tense atmosphere faded. “It was better that she didn’t make it here. You would’ve had to look after her when you went against Legion.”

“I would have stuck her somewhere safe.”

“Nowhere’s safe in this world, David. Legion would have found her and hurt her. It was better that you came here alone.”

“I guess.”

“Well I know,” she said firmly. “I’ve lived here. You can tell her everything when you get back, but for right now, it’s better that you don’t have anyone else with you.”

He believed her, so he nodded. “Yeah.” That was all he said. He leaned back in his chair, watching her as she lifted her cup and took a sip of her coffee. She wore the same outfit she always did: a tattered cloak, and shirt, and pants that billowed out at the ankles, all dark. She had lines and dark-half moons under her eyes, as though she hadn’t slept well. Her hair was unkempt and uncombed, and it fell hallway down her arm, as though it hadn’t been cut or cared for in years. And her arm… her arm, up to her elbow, was gone. She was in a terrible state, and he found his heart aching for her just thinking about it.

Her eyes found his, and he blinked and glanced away.

“What?” she asked.

“I was just looking at you.”

“No, what?”

“I was just…” He didn’t know what to answer, at first, so he raised his mug to his lips and bought himself some time. He could lie and tell her she looked different in a good way. He could tell the truth and tell her she looked different in a good way. Instead, what came out of his mouth was something he didn’t need to think of at all. “I missed you.”

“Me?” she asked, sounding entirely unbothered. “Or her?”

The way she said it - so casually, so easily - surprised him. Of course, he knew she’d had multiple run-ins with him, when he had used the tank to visit her, along with her years of having to run from this other, _evil_ version of him. She’d had time to accept her version of David was lost. But there was a part of him, somewhere on the outskirts of his consciousness, that wanted her to accept that _he_ wasn’t. He could still be saved. He wanted her to know that, and to want that. “Both.”

“Then you didn’t miss me.”

David let out a groan. “Please, don’t do this to me.”

“What? It’s not that hard.” She set her cup down, watching him closely. “You miss the Syd in your timeline. You also missed me.” A pause. “Remember that time you told me I wasn’t your Syd? I remember that.”

“Syd, _please._ I was wrong.”

“And that was the last time you visited me,” she continued, the only acknowledgement that she had heard what he’d just said being the little twitch of her brow. “And then I told you to make good choices, and you went back to your timeline, and you left her. Again.”

“I didn’t - she was brainwashed by Farouk. She tried to _shoot_ me. And the rest of them were going to kill me for - for this!” He gestured around the cafeteria. “The _future._ My ‘future crimes.’ What was I supposed to do? Stay and let them medicate me for the rest of my life? Let them kill me?”

“I’m not her.”

“That’s a _good thing.”_

She looked at him for a long time, leaning over her coffee with her fingers resting around her cup, the steam rising against her face and curling along her cheeks and up into her hair. Even worn out and older and sharper than the Syd in his timeline, she still looked like the woman he loved. She _was_ the woman he loved, every bit of her, even if she existed in a future he hadn’t created and that he didn’t belong in. He just didn’t know this version as well as he knew the other version. That was - if he had even knew the other version at all. Maybe he hadn’t, and that was why they’d had so many disagreements.

He didn’t have time to think of much else, because in the following moment, Syd pushed her coffee away and straightened her back, pressing her elbow into the table.

“You’re going to leave again.”

David frowned and shifted in his seat, pulling his own coffee closer. “I can’t stay here forever. You know that.”

“Yeah, but I know you enough. How you were before.” She looked at him, and her gaze was piercing and sharp and deep, as though she were staring through him instead of directly at him. “You won’t visit.”

Something lit in his mind. “Is that what this is about? Are you doing this because you’re mad at me for not visiting you?” When she didn’t answer, he leaned forward. “I’m here now.”

“You didn’t come here to visit.”

“How do you know?”

She looked down at her cup. “Because you would have tried to look for us if you did.”

David pursed his lips and drew back again. She was right. He wouldn’t deny that. He hadn’t come here to visit her, or Cary, or Clark. He’d come here to see what had happened to cause him to go off the rails and destroy an entire world, and how he’d done it. The first part was easy: everyone had come after him, and disagreed with them, and he’d had to stop them. The second part remained a mystery.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m _sorry,_ okay? For not looking. Maybe I should’ve spared some time to try and find you. Before I came here, I thought about doing that. About looking for you. I thought maybe, that would be easy to do. But it wasn’t. I couldn’t find you when you were in hiding. The whole world felt dead, and cold, and lonely, and grey. I still don’t know how to travel over a whole ocean to get to Europe, so I wouldn’t have been able to find this place anyways. I forgot. I’m sorry. I’m _glad_ I’m here. I’m glad you all found me before Legion killed me. I’m glad to _be_ here, training. I wouldn’t have gotten that back in my past, believe me. I’m glad you didn’t give up on me.” Although he didn’t say it, he knew, by the way she lifted her head to glance back up at him, that she understood what he was trying to say. “I should have looked, but I didn’t. I assumed you were dead. I should have known you were all smarter than that. Sorry.”

She blinked. Then, she smiled faintly. It wasn’t a full smile, but it was one that reached her eyes and made them twinkle the way he always loved seeing. He could never forget what it looked like, but it had been so long since he’d seen it. She looked over to the wall, the smile still in her eyes. “I guess I’ll believe you. Here, in the future.”

Relief flooded through him, as did confusion. “What does that mean?”

“It means I want you to mention that to your Syd.”

Still, he frowned. “That I should have looked for her in the future?”

“Everything. That you went to the future and tried to fight Legion and failed. That we found you, and you trained with us, and you beat Legion for us. That you didn’t look for me, and you should have. Can you do that?” She watched him intently, still smiling, but also with a measure of solemnity in her gaze. Maybe even wariness.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Can you?” she pressed again.

He didn’t want to argue when there was nothing to argue about. If she wanted him to tell her, he’d tell her. “I… I guess.”

“Then that’s all there is to say.” She scooted her chair back, pulling her coffee toward her and beginning to stand.

David leaned forward. “Wait. That’s not all there is to say. We haven’t even talked yet.” Whatever prior irritation he’d had, whatever regret and hesitation he’d had in his mind, vanished, replaced with a sudden desperation to be near her and to keep talking to her. “I barely even know you.”

Again, she watched him for a long several seconds. He couldn’t read the look in her eye. Apparently, she had learned to keep her expression well guarded and unreadable, and he had half a mind to reach out and brush against the surface of her thoughts, just to get a clue of what she was thinking. The urge was like an instinct, deep in his mind, that shook at his awareness every time he wanted to know anything, and it took his all not to let himself do it. He was in no danger. He didn’t have to.

Slowly, she sat back down, taking a drink of her coffee before setting it down in front of her. “I still like cherry pie,” she said. “Coffee’s not my favourite, but we have loads of it down here, so I drink it whenever I can. I’ve learned how to read Cary’s machines since we’ve been down here. I tried to eat waffles, but they didn’t taste the same after you… after he changed. I don’t go outside much anymore. When we rescued you, it was the first time I’d been up to the surface in a year.”

“Oh.” He liked this - this talking about herself. It wasn’t exactly what he’d meant, but he wouldn’t complain. He just didn’t know what to say back to her. His instinct was to start telling her about himself, but that would only detract from _her,_ and what he wanted _was_ to know about her. After a pause, he decided to go with: “Is that it?”

Her smile widened slightly, and he knew he had said the right thing. What he didn’t know was what she was going to answer with, with a satisfied gleam in her eye. “I missed you, too.”

A burst of warmth flooded through him, cascading up his neck to his cheeks before he could even think of stopping it. He hadn’t realised he had been hoping for her to say it back to him until now. This wasn’t his Syd… but she was still Syd, and he still cared about her. He had no doubt he would care for her in any timeline and every timeline. “I’m glad to hear that.”

She sat another moment, her eyes gleaming with her smile, looking him over, as though she were trying to memorise him. And then she stood again, still watching him. The very look made David’s heart skip a beat, and he almost expected her to ask if they could go back to their room. But she only nodded her head and stepped back and said, “I’ll see you later.”

And he watched as she turned and left him sitting, warm and content for the first time in this broken down, dilapidated future.


	5. You Raise the Blade, You Make the Change

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> David's training continues.

The inside of Cary’s underground laboratory looked different from the labs he’d had at Summerland and Division Three. There was no strawberry-scented tank for David to climb into, and no MRI machine where Cary could run his tests. There _were_ machines along all the walls, crammed into corners as though they had been crudely tossed and assembled by people who didn’t know a thing about technology. Some looked old and outdated, but they still seemed to run, and Cary still checked them and ran his findings through them.

Screens lined the walls, just like the panels in the other chambers, lit with numbers and graphs and charts and statistics, all marked in symbols and abbreviations David didn’t recognise. Those that weren’t in use cycled slowly through pictures of the abandoned world - which were in real time, David had learned, in the weeks since his arrival. The hideout had something akin to a control room just across the hallway, where they monitored the state of the world’s most important cities at all times. Any time Legion came near, a sensor alerted them to it, and every panel in the entire hideout would change to that particular camera. And every time, people would crowd around the walls and watch as Legion went about his business, with no idea he was being broadcast through every hideout in the world - however many that happened to be.

Even _David_ felt like he was being intruded on, whenever he had the grand opportunity of being there when it happened, not the least of which because he looked exactly like Legion, save the clothes he wore, which were now the same, dark shirts and pants and cloak-jackets that everyone else wore. Although he blended in, no one ever forgot that he was the universe twin of the greatest plague their world had ever known, because after they were finished watching Legion, they would always sneak a glance at him. He had since come to expect it, but he would never be used to it.

Now, he was biding his time in Cary’s lab, having his vitals checked just like every time he ran a round of training, away from prying eyes. Everyone’s prying eyes, at least, except Cary’s and Clark’s. Cary was conscientious of his staring while he worked and often turned his attention on something else that needed him quick enough. Clark, on the other hand, sat off to the side, leaned back against his chair with his hand rested on his cane, watching David so intently that David thought his gaze would eventually burn a hole straight through him.

As Cary stuck wires against his temples, David looked off toward Clark. “Why do you keep staring?”

“Oh, am I staring?” Clark shifted in his seat. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“It’s been five minutes, yeah. I could understand you doing it before. You know, weeks ago, when I first got here. But now, it’s starting to get on my nerves.” He straightened his arms out, letting Cary stick more wires on the insides of his elbows. “Why?”

“Look, I’m going to pretend, right now, that you’re not dull enough not to know that everyone here’s been staring at you for the past four, five, six months. We’re all interested in you and why you came here.”

“You _know_ why I came here,” David muttered. “I wanted to see what happened to the world, so that I could stop it from happening to _my_ world.”

“Yeah.” Clark smiled faintly, but David could tell that it wasn’t a friendly smile. “You wanted to be the opposite to your world what your twin over here is to this world. A saviour, right? Maybe a martyr?”

From off to his right, Cary spoke up. “David, I don’t want you to talk for a second. I’m running this now.”

So David didn’t talk. He kept his gaze on Clark and let what he said sit in the air. He knew he had wanted to stop this apocalypse however he could. He’d wanted to since the moment he had agreed on Future Syd’s request to find Farouk’s body. That in itself was a hard commitment to follow, considering Farouk was the be-all-and-end-all of bad guys: the worst villain the world had ever seen. He was an evil, malicious entity who didn’t deserve to find his body. But David had tried to help anyways, had gone against everything he stood for, just so he could see the world safe. That counted, didn’t it?

The machine beeped, and Cary returned to tug the wires off.

“I want to help people,” David responded. “It’s not about being a saviour. I just… I want to make sure no one else goes through what I went through. Thirty years of Farouk in my head, making me think I was sick, making me think my powers weren’t real, forcing me to be a failure at everything I ever did. At _life._ My life would have been a lot better if Farouk hadn’t possessed me when I was a baby.” He pressed his nails into his palms and looked down. “But now, I know. I _know_ I have powers, I _know_ I’m powerful, and I _know_ I can make sure this -” A gesture around the lab, indicative of their entire world - “never happens. I can help. I don’t have to harm, like Legion does.”

He thought of his commune, and of all the people who loved him and stayed with him. He thought of when he had first started it: how he’d begun to find stray mutants, and those humans who knew of mutants - not unlike Amy, and Lenny, if she could be called human now - and all those who needed help and didn’t fit in. He had created a place where they could all live together and take care of each other. He had given them a second chance at life, to allow them to live the way they wanted to live. He’d helped, and they had stayed, because he had asked them to. Sometimes, _they_ even helped him. Switch helped him. They were all the support he’d needed.

Until he’d gotten stuck in a time that wasn’t his own. Until the people who blamed him in _his_ time helped him in _their_ time.

Clark lifted a brow, watching him skeptically. “And are you? Helping people?”

David frowned. “Just because you haven’t seen it yet doesn’t mean I’m not helping.”

“You’ve been here for months.”

_“Training,”_ David shot back, and Cary returned to the side of his chair. “Listening to all of you tell me what’s actually going on in my head. Making sure I know what to do when the time comes.”

“Easy does it,” Cary murmured softly. He pressed a button on the side of the seat, and David’s chair began to lean back.

David folded his hands on his stomach, looking up at the ceiling. He tilted his chin up, letting Cary stick more patches beneath his jaw. “Besides, being here for months is good for me. It gives me more time to learn what I need to. You’ve been there. You’ve seen me improve.” He hadn’t been thrown into a wall in weeks, and he had learned to pair his telekinesis with his teleportation, freezing anything around the space he wanted to appear at before he appeared. “I can do this. I can get rid of him for you.”

Although his gaze was on the ceiling, David could see Clark stand from his seat. He could hear the cane tap along the floor, softly at first, growing steadily louder and closer, until Clark stood on the other side of his chair, opposite Cary.

“Have you ever stopped to think about what we’re going to do once Legion is dead?” Clark leaned over him, eyeing the patches Cary had stuck on his neck.

David paused. He hadn’t. “What are you going to do?”

“Ah - no. That’s not what I wanted to hear. Have you, or have you not, ever stopped to think about what we’re going to do once Legion is dead?”

He scowled. “No. I haven’t.”

Clark raised an eyebrow. “Do you think it would help us or harm us, for you to get rid of him?”

“Help. Why are you asking me this? I thought the whole point of you all rescuing me and bringing me back here and telling me about myself and my powers and making me learn this was so that I could kill him once and for all, for you.”

“We’re not making you do anything.”

Exasperation began to pool in David’s jaw. He clenched his teeth together tightly. Dealing with Clark was like dealing with a runaway freight train. That talked. “No, okay? You’re not. I’m doing this because I want to. You know how I know that? Because nobody - not you or anyone else in this facility or this entire world, or _my_ entire world - can _make_ me do anything.”

Clark seemed to mull that over for a long moment, his gaze trained on David’s face. Eventually, a satisfied smirk appeared at his lips. He stepped back. “All right. I was just checking.”

“For what?”

“Traces of Legion.”

David felt his expression falter. Before he could think of anything to say back, Cary had returned again, this time with a long strip to drape over his forehead. By now, David was familiar with the device: a laboratory tool disguised as a soothing towel, designed to both measure brain activity and act as a subtle sedative to lull him into his thoughts, that allowed him to forget the world around him for a while. He had needed it more when he had first begun training, to hide away from his hurting body. Now, he found he used it only to catch another hour’s worth of sleep during the day.

Cary looked down at him, then turned his attention toward Clark. “Are you two finished talking?”

“Yeah,” Clark answered, already halfway to the door. “I’m done. Do what you need to do.”

David wanted to answer that _he_ wasn’t done yet, that _he_ still had things to say, even if he hadn’t figured them out yet. All he knew was, he wasn’t Legion. He had made that clear. At least, he thought he had. Clark seemed to be blaming him, or accusing him. But he _wasn’t_ Legion. Everyone else knew that. _He_ knew that.

Gently, Cary draped the heavy strip over his forehead, its edges running from temple to temple. It felt like a small weighted blanket, except it was cold and would numb his thoughts and his mind within the minute. “Are you ready, David?”

David shut his eyes, deciding that Clark’s comment didn’t matter, in the long run. “Yeah. Let me go.” He knew he wasn't Legion. He knew because he had met Legion himself, in real life. Not in his head. Not like he spoke to Divad and Dvd in his head. Besides, he didn’t need to worry about being Legion anyways. Clark only meant _traces_ of Legion. Not the entirety. Maybe having a little bit of Legion in him was a good thing. It meant they were similar. It meant David could _beat_ him. Legion had said, after all, that David was the only other person capable of becoming strong enough to defeat him.

He felt his thoughts and eyelids grow heavy. Then the world spun, and he drifted off.

* * *

_“You do realise you were a little slow on the uptake there, right?” Divad prodded, as he stood in the doorway of their room, his fingers clamped around the neck of Dvd’s shirt._

_Clenching his teeth, Dvd yanked his shirt out of Divad’s grip, pacing across the foot of the bed. “You’re a real piece of work, you know that? Like you have any room to talk. Sure, you’re saying I’m slow. I know. You’re faster. I’m stronger. We get it.”_

_David - as he normally was whenever he had to listen to either one of them - was on his back on the bed, a pillow over his face, currently trying to suffocate himself and failing. “Can you two stop arguing?” His voice was so muffled, he wasn’t sure either of them could understand him._

_“As soon as he stops taunting me for not being as fast as him,’” Dvd shot back._

_Divad laughed, straightening himself up and moving to shut the door behind him. “Why? Just cause you don’t like hearing the truth?”_

_“No. Because you won’t -”_

_“Can both of you just shut the hell up?” David threw the pillow forward. It hit the wall on the other side of the room, sliding down onto the dresser and knocking several plaques and scattered figurines off. He sat up with a grunt, grimacing. “We’re not supposed to be arguing anymore. We’re supposed to be working together to beat whatever Legion’s got in store for us.”_

_“I know what he has.” Divad leaned against the dresser, pushing away a small bottle with his foot. “He has a bunch of us in his head. More than just us two -” He gestured between the three of them - “and probably more powerful. He did say he knew more than us.”_

_“Yeah, but that was before,” David said._

_“Right, but that probably means he’s better practiced. That means he knows his powers and everyone in his head better than we know each other - which,” he blurted, when David opened his mouth to argue, “isn’t that much better_ now. _I know. But we’ve only had a few months of training compared to his few years. We’ve got to make sure we’re in sync with each other.”_

_“We are,” Dvd grunted._

_“Not completely.” Divad looked over at David. “Not until we work together on the outside.”_

_David frowned. “How is that supposed to work? When I’m out, you two aren’t, and when one of you is out, me and the other aren’t.”_

_Divad clicked his tongue. “Okay. It’s concentration. I’ve checked. When you’re in the middle of a battle, or when you want to get in touch with us… you have to make sure you keep us just as present in your mind as if you were us.”_

_David paused. “... You know that makes no sense, right?”_

_“Yeah, but it’s the only way I know how to explain it.”_

_“You know how you panic and then you get all useless?” Dvd asked, stepping forward._

_Both David and Divad stared at him._

_He frowned at them. “It’s like that. Except you’ve got to try_ not _to be useless and freak yourself out until you can’t handle it. Everyone always says ‘calm down’ - well, that’s going to have to be what you do if you want any of this to work out. I told you before: you don’t need anybody. You’ve got everything you need, right here.” He reached up and tapped the side of his head, and David felt it at the same spot. “So instead of letting yourself go away, just feel for us.”_

_“I can’t just_ not _panic,” David said. “That’s not how this works.”_

_“You have to try it, one time. The first time you feel us both, it will be much easier. You get me?”_

_David looked at Divad, but Divad only shrugged and crossed his arms. “He’s right. You’re strong enough to stop the claws and the attacks on your mind. Now you just have to get in touch with us.”_

_“The faster you do it, the faster we get out of here and beat Legion,” Dvd said, lifting a brow._

_David looked between them, his brow furrowed._

* * *

David stood near the edge of the circle, one arm out and fingers clutching the metal rod that jutted out of the floor so tightly that his knuckles burned. This practice was the hardest attack they had ever hit him with, only a stretch before the real thing.

As the next wave of simulated psychic attacks came at him, he let go of the rod, slamming his palm against the side of his head and squeezing his eyes shut. The onslaught came as pressure against his mind, slamming against the walls he had already pulled around it. Sharp as a knife, it seared through its thick layers, but David was ready for it. He pulled the rest of the wall toward the wounded area, forcing it back, away from him.

Something else stirred just behind David. On a fast reflex, he arched his powers around to block that one from hitting him. From the side came another, and again, he blocked. Another: block. Again and again and again, they came, and again and again and again, he deflected them.

Then, something hit him from above. He thought it came from above, at least, the way it spread from the top of his mind. Pure agony, splitting through his temples and down between his eyes and the back of his head, blinding him with pain.

He heard someone scream, and forced his eyes open. His vision was hazy, but he could see that he had somehow ended up on his knees. The pain pulsed at the corners of his vision and made his eyes water. This type of attack had never happened before in a training session. He felt like he was dying.

He couldn’t panic. He couldn’t _panic_ \- that was what Dvd had told him. He had to listen, had to grope for anything solid through the fog of his thoughts, anything that could possibly be Dvd or Divad.

_You’ve got it,_ came a sudden, loud voice from inside his mind, but he couldn’t tell whether it was Dvd or Divad. Maybe it was both. _Come on. We have your back._

No. They were right. He couldn’t give up now. Not when this was the last before they let him go.

So, with everything he could muster - and with a little extra help push from who he could only assume was Dvd and Divad - David threw his mind out at all angles, fast and scalding. With three loud cracks, the rods burst from their places, flying across the room and slamming against the walls, before crashing noisily to the floor. The tables and chairs that held spare weapons flew out, away from him, tumbling across the floor. The walls and ceiling shook, and the lights flickered. For the first time, his mind felt open, free to do whatever he wanted to do, and completely connected to Divad and Dvd. They were there, as much as he was.

And then the field crackled to life around him, surrounding him quickly in a thick bubble.

_Told you._

“Are you doing okay, David?” Cary asked, from inside the control room.

David’s head pulsed with a slight ache, but it hardly bothered him now. Not when Divad - he knew it was Divad now, could feel the familiar coolness of his presence, like a soothing mint, brushing over his aches and dampening them. “Never been better.”

In his mind, Divad chuckled.

The field disappeared as quickly as it came. In no time, Cary was out of his control room and down to where David stood. Syd and Clark followed behind him.

David smiled sheepishly. “Looks like I broke everything… again. Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Cary said. The eager and invigorated expression on his face made it clear he believed it, and that he wasn’t just saying it to ease David’s guilt. “This is good. It means you’re _ready_ for whatever he throws at you.”

“And you’re sure about this?”

Clark stepped around to Cary’s side. He leaned on his cane, looking him over, his eyes slightly narrowed, his gaze scrutinising. “Hmm. Yeah. You sure he’s ready? He sure did bad controlling himself when it came to not breaking all the equipment in this room.” He nodded his head toward the fallen chairs and ruined rods lying scattered near the wall.

Dvd groaned. _When do we get to sock this guy?_

_Never,_ Divad replied.

“I think he has it,” Cary countered. “David - you’ll be fine. These were all on the highest setting, which should have, if you _weren’t_ ready, incapacitated you. But you got through them all. As far as I know, my adjustments these past few years have matched the highest degree of Legion’s powers - that we’ve measured. Which means that, if you can get through that, you can get through Legion.”

Somehow, that didn’t make him feel better. “What if what you measured wasn’t the worst that Legion can do?”

“We’ll have to trust that it is,” Syd said, a reassuring smile at her lips. “There’s nothing else we can use to test you, David. You’ve shown enough power.” She stepped closer, crossing her arms. “Believe in yourself, David. You’re just as strong as he is. But this time, you’re stronger.” She tapped a finger at the side of her head. “You know things now. Dvd, Divad. You know how they operate. You know what your powers can do. You know what you’re capable of, which means you know what he’s capable of. You have to believe in this, David. In yourself. Otherwise, we can’t move on.”

Slowly, David nodded. She was right. “Okay. I’m ready for the next test.”

“If you can exhibit that much strength during the field test,” Cary said, “then I think you might be ready.”

David’s lip curved up in a half-smile. “Then let’s hope I’m ready.”

They retreated back to the control room. David positioned himself nearby, tracking the claws as they began to spin.

“Give us everything you’ve got, David,” Cary’s voice came over the speakers. That he was even mentioning it this time was more generous than usual. As of late, they just never warned David at all, because he had become more and more capable of predicting when the cranes would come lurching at him without warning. In this very training session, he hadn’t sustained a single hit, a single bruise - not even a single touch. He was nearly perfect. This had become ritual, once a day. Over and over and over again, fight after fight.

In the corner of his eye, he saw a crane suddenly shoot toward him. He threw an arm out, throwing an invisible wall between him and the crane. The crane slammed into it and went spinning.

The hair on the back of his neck stood. He vanished in an instant, reappearing ten feet back. A crane whirled last where he had just stood, and he sent a sharp bolt into the joint that connected it to the ceiling. The claws gave a great spasm, then stopped moving entirely.

He would have asked Cary if they could fix that, but at that moment, a claw clipped just past his ear. Not a millisecond too late, he was gone again, at the other end of the glass room. He had to look through it to track the crane. He knew he shouldn’t become distracted, but his gaze flickered to Syd anyways. She sat against the wall, her shoulder pressed against the glass, her gaze intently on him. He couldn’t read the look in her eyes, but his heart skipped a beat regardless. He wanted to drop everything he was doing, just for a chance to speak with her for a minute. Just a little break. A _recharge._

Then the crane came spinning toward him. He teleported seven feet away, but the crane moved quicker, flying towards him in the same instant he reappeared, forcing him to teleport another few feet away.

Again, before he could regain his thoughts, the crane shot toward him.

He waited until it was nearly to him before vanishing to the other end of the room again. It took the crane approximately three seconds for the crane to reach him, which gave him enough time to shut his eyes and gather everything within him. In a second, he had the movements of the spinning claws mapped in his mind’s eye, whirling slowly, as though the entire world had slowed - or, maybe, his mind had suddenly sped up by a thousand times. One claw curled a millisecond faster than the others, and David grabbed it with his powers, yanking it away from him. Before the other claws could close, he pushed them outward, until he heard them screech and burst from their hinges, one by one, leaving holes in the metal that he could shove right into.

He opened his eyes. The clawless crane was only inches from hitting him, but in that moment, he let his powers explode outward. The crane exploded, shrapnel flying in every direction. He directed the debris away from his body, and it curved away from his head and his body and tumbled around him instead.

The engines shut off. The speakers crackled, but nobody came over the air to speak. Instead, Cary left the room himself, followed by Syd, then Clark. They stepped over pieces of metal, and David suddenly became aware that this damage was irreparable. He had never destroyed anything in training.

“Sorry,” he said quickly.

“No, David,” Cary answered, stopping in front of him. “That was good. That was very good.” He looked David over, checking for any wounds, and David responded with a little shake of his arms and a stretch of his fingers. “I told myself that you would be ready for Legion after you figured out a way to destroy these quickly on the highest setting, without so much as a break between sessions. And now you’ve done it.”

Syd stepped around Cary. Her lips were pressed in a thin line, but David could see the faint wrinkle on her cheek that he recognised in her smile. “Good job.”

David smiled faintly. He glanced around the room - at the ruined crames and the crushed, shattered metal on the floor. So this was it. He hasn’t actually thought of what he would do once he was ready. Once he had to leave this place. It had grown on him, and so had everyone here. This Cary, this Clark, this Syd. It tasted bittersweet.

“We’ve got a few preparations to begin,” Clark said, tapping his cane on the floor twice and clearing his throat. “I’m going to get out of here, start a few of those up. We’ve got to double check the perimeters, make sure it’s strong enough to hold if he happens to be around when you leave, bolster them a little. Buy you enough time to get out of here and cut him down before he can cause any damage to the rest of us. Should take us a week or so.” He moved toward the door. “You coming?”

David’s eyes roamed to the walls, settling on a sharp-edged shadow. “No, I think I’ll stay here for a little bit.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” He turned away from them, glancing around the room. “I want to look around a little bit. You know you haven’t actually used half the stuff on me?” He gestured to the rack of weapons by the wall.

“That’s because Legion doesn’t know how to use them,” Cary said, smiling reassuringly. “And neither do you. He thinks he only needs himself, but -”

“One of them does,” David cut in. “I know that for a fact.”

_That is_ not _fair,_ Dvd whispered. _I only say that because it’s true._

Cary gave him a funny look. “At least one of them thinks that, but we know… you needed the help, too. To understand what you have. Legion never had that. He never had help, he doesn’t know what anyone is called, and he doesn’t know how to work together with them.”

“How do you know?”

“Because, David,” Clark groused, already at the door, “we studied him. Extensively. In case you forgot. And we know things.”

Sighing, Cary reached out, placing a hand on David’s shoulder. “The most powerful you can be is when you can work together with as many identities in your mind as possible. They make you whole. Legion, he shifts consciousness, but he’s never any one identity at a time. And that will be his downfall.”

That made sense. David’s mind - and Legion’s - was split into Divad and Dvd… and him. And that meant he hadn’t been whole.

Divad purred contently. _Not till now._

“I get it now.” David smiled. “We beat him by using all of us. Not just one of us at a time.”

“Exactly.” Cary moved away. Beside him, Syd nodded and turned away. “That’s why I know you’re ready now.”

_Thanks. Thanks Cary._

_He’s all right._

“They say thanks,” said David, after a moment. “And so do I.”

“You’re welcome.” Cary watched them for a moment. Then, smiling faintly, he turned away.


	6. To Set Into Motion A Love Divine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> David and Syd spend some time together before he leaves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is the reason why this fic is rated mature. ;)
> 
> NOTE: mention of rape ahead. Read with discretion.

Lying on his bed in his room, David watched as the light faded from green to yellow, and then to blue, slowly and deliberately and slowly enough to steady his heart from its normal quick pace. He couldn’t stop thinking about his last battle with Legion, when he had nearly lost himself hitting his head on that wall. Whatever happened then couldn’t happen again. He knew better now.

 _Worrying only means you suffer twice,_ Divad piped up helpfully.

For the past few weeks, David had been practicing his ability _not_ to freak out in his blurry hazes, like Dvd had told him, but to instead hold the consciousness of Divad and Dvd both close to him when he felt them. Sometimes, he would fail, disappearing into his mind for an undisclosed amount of time - two hours, twelve hours, days at a time - until he finally awakened somewhere else in the hideout.

Right now, Dvd lingered in his mind too, in what he could only describe as the other side of his thoughts. For the most part, neither one were very noisy. They were prone to interjecting their feelings, which threatened to encompass David’s own, but David had become better at pushing them aside for his own. Better at separating without being truly separate.

A knock at the door pulled him out of his thoughts. He squeezed his eyes shut, pushing himself up and scooting back against his bed. “Come in.”

The door slid open, and in came Syd. As it shut behind her, she stepped further into the room, her gaze roaming over David. “Are you busy?”

“No. Just practicing.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“That’s what I figured you were doing, coming into my room like that.” He offered her a teasing smile, crossing his legs, but he worried about what she meant. “About what? Did you find more stuff out about Legion?”

“No. I just wanted to talk.” She shrugged her shoulders, and David knew that she was telling the truth. He looked toward the lights, watching out of the corner of his eye as Syd came to sit at the edge of his bed. “I wanted to let you know that… I watched you,” she said. “In your past. I thought you should know.”

He looked toward her. Her eyes were on him, intense, her expression unreadable. “Watched me?”

“I started watching you when you first visited me. I didn’t know you could do... what you did, and I wanted to know… how.” She paused. “I was worried you were going down the wrong path. Legion’s path. I wanted to know how you found me. What you were doing. Why you were doing what you were doing. Your reasons. I wanted to make sure this wouldn’t happen.”

David stood. “I would never destroy the world.”

“I was worried you would,” she repeated, crossing her arm over her abdomen. “It happened in this world. I had to watch it happen to him. I didn’t want it to happen to you. So I watched you. And when you came back, I tried to warn you, but all I could do was watch you struggle to deal with him. Farouk.” She shook her head. “I didn’t like watching you struggle.”

“I was confused,” David said. “I didn’t know why you were asking me to help Farouk find his body, and you weren’t telling me anything.”

“I know. I didn’t want to… break anything.” Syd looked away. “The continuum. I didn’t want to jinx it. I thought, if you knew what you turned into in the future, you’d deny it and deny it, until it came true.”

He frowned. “And instead -”

“Instead,” she cut in suddenly, “Farouk killed your sister, just like he killed your sister in this timeline. He found Lenny’s remains, took a sample, and shoved it into Amy, just like he did in this timeline. And you went out, just like you’d always had planned, without telling me, and killed Farouk. Except, in this timeline, I didn’t stop you.”

David tugged at the sheets of the bed. “What does that mean?”

“I didn’t stop you from going out and killing Farouk. He deserved to die, so I came by with the others, later, after you’d killed Farouk. They told me I wasn’t part of the plan.”

He hadn’t realised just how much of this timeline was the same as his own. “It was too dangerous, Syd. With your powers… I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

“I know that. It’s okay.” Syd looked up at him, her eyes sad. “You were looking out for me. But now, I know… we should never have let you kill Farouk.” She watched him blankly as he frowned, then inclined her chin and continued. “Something about killing him changed you. Like… like you suddenly thought that killing was okay. That anyone who deserved to die should die by your hand. I don’t know what it was, but we noticed. And he read our minds, and he left us. And then he started killing people. Random people. Mutants, sometimes. We had to try, David.”

People who _deserved to die._ “He was trying to help,” he realised aloud. Legion was trying to help by getting rid of the people he thought were bad.

“Well, if he _was,_ he was doing it wrong.”

David had the sudden urge to reach out and pull her into his arms. If Legion had somehow managed to get his hands on her and kill her, like he _thought_ he’d done, before, then his own timeline never would have changed. He would have gone down the same path. The thought sent thorns through his fingertips, and he squeezed them against his palms and stretched them back out again, forcing his arms down to his sides. “You’re right. He was. You can’t help by killing people.”

Syd looked at his hands. “I wanted to tell you that. But I had to let you figure things out on your own.”

Although her face was angled downward, David could still see the despair in the lines of her face. He knew her well enough, and he knew the little changes in her expression, and what those changes meant. She was troubled and upset. “I did eventually, right? I didn’t end up destroying the world. I came here, and now I’m going to clear everything up and set it straight. Things turned out different… because of you.”

She watched him for a long moment, her expression betraying none of her thoughts. David didn’t read them. Then, she lifted her chin, nodding toward the door. “Did you want to see how I watched you?”

David frowned. “You want to show me?”

“Yeah. It won’t hurt. I think it will be good.” Syd stood and motioned for him to follow.

She led him out into the hallway and past several doors, until they reached the elevator at the end of the hallway. She stepped in first, David straight after, and pressed the small, pink light-ringed button beneath all the other numbers. The elevator jolted into movement, but David couldn’t tell whether it was going up, or down, or sideways - only that the floor was vibrating, vaguely, like a humming engine beneath his boots, and that it was going somewhere. But where, he didn’t know.

They rode in silence. At last, the doors opened, and Syd led him into the room.

This was the same room as he had appeared in the last time he’d visited her. Short cylindrical tanks jutted from the floor, covered with glass and ringed with a blue glow around the top edges. The ceiling and walls caved outwards, letting in blinding, white light that brightened the entire room enough to see past the end of his fingers. The way the walls were positioned, David assumed the light that streamed in came from the sun. That they were somewhere above ground.

“Syd…”

“No.” She made her way to one of the cylinders. “I know what you’re thinking. I didn’t bring you here to spite you. I come here when I want to look into your timeline. Come here.”

Slowly, David walked over to her. She knelt by the small tank, and so did he, and they say across from each other, peering into the glass and the depths below. Glowing jellyfish drifted past, tentacles pushing through what was apparently water, or a liquid of some sort. Beyond them lay darkness.

“What am I supposed to be seeing?” he asked.

“Nothing, yet. It doesn’t know what we want.” Syd reached out, placing her hand over the glass and spreading her fingers. “What do you want to see?”

David watched as a jellyfish swam closer to the glass. When it noticed Syd’s hand, it swam away. He knew what he wanted to see. “Can you show me my timeline?”

She nodded and shut her eyes. Beneath her palm, the darkness began to change, shifting first into grey, then into a cloudy off-whiteness. Seconds later, the fog dispersed. Syd moved her hand, and David saw Cary, looking younger and less fatigued, speaking with Kerry in the lab back at Division Three. Cary sat in a chair in front of a screen and panel, while Kerry stood, pacing behind his chair, urgently saying something he couldn’t hear.

David had missed her, in his time here, and he leaned forward to get a better look. She seemed less uncomfortable, being outside Cary’s body, and more confident in the way she carried herself. Not that she ever seemed modest about herself. She fought well, and she knew it. “I never asked Cary, but… what happened to her?”

Syd didn’t say anything for a long moment. She stared at the scene in thought, as though he had asked something she wasn’t keen on answering. “A few years back, the Divisions decided to move on Legion. Division One, Division Two, and us, Division Three. We had a whole plan laid out. We would take him by surprise: overwhelm him with thoughts, and then send in the tactical units when he was vulnerable. We went in, we got his defenses down, we sent Kerry and all the squads in. We thought we had him.

“But there was an accident. When they were fighting Legion, he broke free and started attacking back. By the time I got there, it was too late. His mind was too strong, and we hadn’t trained enough.” She blinked and shook her head, looking away from the glass and staring off at the wall.

David was glad he had been too busy to ask Cary. He’d thought about it, once or twice, but never thought any time was the right time. “That must have been hard on Cary.”

“It was. He never thought she’d die before he did. We couldn’t get him to talk for months, but he never stopped working. Not once. I don’t know.” She looked back at the scene in the cylinder. “We’ve all lost someone in this world.”

He wasn’t certain what she meant, and he opened his mouth to ask, but at that moment, the scene began to change again, until it showed Clark, sitting in a dimly lit room, telepad in hand as he took notes on something David couldn’t see. Sitting in front of his desk was a small picture of a man and a young teenager. Clark’s family. David hadn’t seen them around, either. This time, he didn’t ask.

Again, the glass clouded over, and then cleared over a picture of Syd, sitting at the foot of a bed with her legs crossed, leaned over her knees, the compass he had given her open in her hand. She was in the room they had shared at Division Three. The bed beside hers was perfectly made - and empty.

His heart ached terribly at the sight, and he scooted closer to the cylinder, until his knees touched the sides. He missed her. He missed her so much that he felt his lip quiver and the tears prod at his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m sorry.”

The Syd that sat in front of him said nothing. Slowly, she stood, moving back to give him space. He didn’t want her to leave, but her leaving helped him breathe. It helped the grief that bubbles from his chest up into his throat.

Under the glass, Syd shook her compass. She held it for a moment, then shut it, delving it from her neck and sitting it in front of her. Then she folded her hands, resting her elbows on her knees and pressing her mouth against her knuckles. There she stayed, as if she were in thought.

He had left her there at Division Three, alone. Alone with the people who had trapped him. Alone with Farouk. Who knew how much he was feeding into their minds right now, about how vile a person David was, about how they needed to stop him before he destroyed the world. It wasn’t true. He wouldn’t destroy the world after all. That ninety-eight percent chance only applied to _this_ universe. They had changed it. They had changed the course of time, and now he could get her back.

He shut his eyes and lowered his head, feeling out with his mind until he found Syd’s thoughts. He pulled her consciousness to him in an instant, curling his powers around her and projecting them astrally into an entirely different room. This one was similar in colour to the old room - the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and all the decorations were white - but the structure had changed. Instead of the singular, rectangular expanse and the window that sat in front of a beach, the room now resembled his childhood bedroom, albeit more spacious, so that they had more room to walk. A wide rug poked out from beneath a large, queen-sized bed, and above it hung his posters, washed out in colour. His drawers and desk were in the same place, but they were cleaner and had nothing on them or in them. On the right was an open window, concealed by translucent curtains that blew with a faint wind, and outside came the sound of shivering trees. So many days during his childhood, the forest around his house had been his ambience. The sound soothed him even now.

“Our room,” Syd breathed in awe behind him.

“Not exactly. Something better.” He turned to face her.

She stood near the door. Her usual tattered black outfit was now pure white, restored to mint condition. Even her shoes, which were low-heeled and clicked heavily when she walked, had turned white. Her hair was combed and fell down to her elbows in large curls. Most of the lines in her face had disappeared. Her gaze, which was on him, was awake and energetic.

But only one hand hung at her side. The other arm dangled from her shoulder, still cut off at the elbow, still ending in a stub.

This was the Astral Plane. This was a place where David could make anything happen. He could create anything he wanted. “I can give you your arm back,” he said, nodding to her stub.

“Why?”

David raised his brows, surprised by the question. “I… why what? I thought you might want it back.”

“Who says I want it back?” She stepped from the door, trailing her fingers over his empty desk and drawers, looking entirely unbothered by her own question.

“No one.” He had only assumed that she would want it back. If he ever lost an arm, _he_ would want it back. “I just thought… you know, it’s easier to do things when you have both your arms.”

Syd glided toward him, stopping several feet in front of him. “Yeah. But sometimes, what changes us becomes part of who we are. Whether it’s physically, or mentally, or both. And sometimes, we don’t want to change that.” She reached across herself, setting her hand on her short arm. “I’ve learned to live with this. I wouldn’t change it now.”

David’s fingers twitched at his side. He wanted to touch her, but something came to mind that made him stop himself. Something from far back. A flash: the walls of Division Three, of Syd’s temporary room, after she had defeated the Minotaur and they had captured Farouk. The late night before the sentencing, when everything in the building was still, and he, not wishing to break the stagnant atmosphere - and unable to simply walk there without the rest of the Division knowing - had projected himself outside of his body and into Syd’s room. They had made love, or so he’d thought, until she told him otherwise, in the fateful flipped trial, locked in the power-obstructing field.

_You drugged me and had sex with me._

Over Syd’s shoulder, he suddenly saw Divad standing in the corner, his back and head against the wall, his arms wrapped across his abdomen, watching him solemnly. He raised a brow, lifted an arm, and gestured at Syd, as if to say: _Make sure you don’t do that again._

David’s gaze found her face. Pressing his lips together, he raised his hand enough that she could notice it. “Can I…”

Syd lifted her chin and stepped closer. “You better.”

When he looked back to the wall, Divad was gone.

He set his palm on her arm. For a split second, he worried they might somehow swap bodies, even in the Astral Plane, but it passed when he realised they were still completely intact as themselves. He ran his thumb along her skin, smoothing down the soft, nearly invisible hair and passing over uneven lines he could only assume were scars from the years she had spent fighting his own doppelgänger.

“Keep them,” she said softly, her eyes on him, as his fingers ran back across the scars. “I don’t want you to forget them. This future. Me.”

He had spent so many weeks here that she, so properly washed and clean and affectionate, didn’t look quite like Syd to him. He had grown used to her disheveled state and torn clothing and the quiet confidence that rang out through it all. She had shown him a new side of Syd - a new _type_ of Syd, self-assured in everything she did, around everyone she came across: someone he had never known before. Back in Clockworks, they had both been diminished by the drugs they took, by the belief that they were both sick and needed to be better. At Summerland, they hadn’t realised the extent of their powers: Syd with her body swapping, and David with all of his powers - the extent of which, apparently, he hadn’t reached yet, if Legion was anyone to be trusted.

But here, now, in the future that had happened to her and hadn’t happened to him, there was potential. They could learn each other. He could learn who she was, if only once. So he reached up, placing a hand at her jaw.

She smiled beneath his palm, placing her hand over the back of his. It was smaller than his, but her palm was warm as it slid across his knuckles, her fingers welcoming as they laced between his. “I missed you,” she said. “I thought I would never see you again.”

David moved his thumb down and brushed it over her lips. “I know. I wish none of this had ever happened. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

“But it was.” Her gaze flickered across his face. “In my timeline, anyways, it was… inevitable. You were meant to go off by yourself, with no one to keep you in check, and turn into this… monster.”

David winced at that, but she shook her head to tell him that she didn’t think _he_ was a monster. Her arms snaked around his waist, and she began to walk backwards, pulling him with her. He straddled her as he walked, and when they reached the edge of the bed, she pulled him down onto herself, scooting up so that he could sit on her thighs.

“I want you to be happy,” she said. “Make good choices.”

“I’m trying.” He had been trying ever since he made the conscious decision to come back in time, in order to find Legion and explore the world. So maybe he hadn’t planned to get stuck here, and meet everyone else, and learn from them. Maybe he hadn’t intended to train with them. But everything had happened now, and he didn’t regret the time he spent. He didn’t regret being here, now. Leaning down, he propped his arms to either side of her head. All he cared about right now was her. “I’m trying right now to make good choices. Is it working?”

Syd smiled widely. She brought her hand to the side of his face face, gently guiding it down and pressing a kiss to his lips in answer. “I think so,” she murmured against his lips.

Although this was Syd, David felt as though he were kissing someone not quite her. And yet, he had kissed her dozens of times before, in the Astral Plane, in their shared past. But that was where the similarities ended. This wasn’t the first time they had kissed. David thought of one other time, when he had returned here for the very last time in the tank - long before Switch and her time-travelling powers had ever crossed his mind. That was different, even though the concept was the same. No swapping bodies, no worries: only the faint, distant feeling that he was doing wrong, and that he never should have come at all.

He felt none of it now.

With a grunt, he pushed himself onto his knees again, making quick work of his button-down shirt and undoing the buttons on Syd’s own shirt. They shrugged them down their arms, tossing them to the side, and then David leaned back over her, too impatient to let their lips stay away for too long, and kissed her again. Unwilling to let this drag, he shut his eyes.

And then they were both completely naked and sitting up, David against the bedframe and Syd between his legs, leaning back against him, her thighs spread. His hand was already between her legs, the side of his finger running against her folds, and his lips were already against her jaw, trailing lightly over her skin. “I want to go first.”

She tilted her chin up, looking up at him seriously. “Go ahead.”

He curled his fingers, prodding and running his fingers up and down between her legs. Then they moved down again, to her entrance, where he slowly pushed a finger in, just to test the waters. Syd moved slightly between his legs, her legs twitching, pressing closer back against him, and shut her eyes. In the Astral Plane, they could create whatever they wanted. Syd had learned that sometime in the past: when he took his finger out, it was moist. He rubbed it across her slit, up to her clit, where he circled around it with the pad of his finger before returning back down.

Two fingers this time. Then three - which seemed to cross the threshold. Syd moaned softly, as though she were trying not to let out any noise while he touched her. He brought his fingers back out, sliding the wetness up to her clit again and focusing on it, rubbing over the hood, where she was less sensitive but still seemed to enjoy it. While he did, he brushed his thoughts over hers, as he always did, feeling for himself how she felt, if only faintly, just to make sure he wasn’t overdoing it. Just to make sure her mind was clear, just to make sure she still knew what was happening. She did.

“David,” she murmured, spreading her legs wider and tilting her head back so that she could rest it on his shoulder.

“I’ve got you.” He brought his other arm around her other side, playing his fingers at her nipples, which were fortuitously hardened already. “You okay?”

She took a moment to adjust herself against him. “I’m fine. I like this. Go on.”

And he did, dipping four fingers into her the next time and curling them up against the wall. She gasped sharply this time, knocking her head against his shoulder and digging her toes into the covers. He liked the reaction, so he made sure to brush gently with the pads of his fingers. For fun, he amplified her pleasure, kneading the knuckle of his thumb against her clit until she was arching back against him and pressing her heels into the mattress and stumbling over curses.

She came around his fingers, tight and fast and loud, and when he pulled his fingers away and trailed wetness up her stomach, she could do nothing but pant shallowly. For a moment, they rested like that, speaking nothing but feeling everything.

And then, Syd pulled away, crawling onto her knees and turning to face him. “Get up.”

David frowned, sitting up. “Why?”

“I want to try something. Something we haven’t done before. Get up and turn around.”

Oh. He knew where this was going before she had even shut her mouth. He’d been with guys before. “Really?”

A sly smile tugged at her lip. She held her hand out, standing up on the mattress. “Yeah. Don’t worry, I’ll share. Just make a strap-on for me and turn around.”

For the hell of it, he made her a two-way, long enough that it would be in the both of them at the same time. He moved forward, holding his hands out, and she set one strap on his palm so that he could hold it as she pulled it around her pelvis. As he tied it for her, he watched her face. “Have you done this before?”

“What do you think?” she asked, in a way that answered his question: _Of course she had._

Seeing her like this made him want to crawl right back to her and smother her lips again. But he resisted the urge, turning around and crawling up to the bed frame, pressing his forearm and cheek against the wall. He reached down to wrap his fingers around his erection, slowly running his palm along it.

Syd approached him. She pressed the dildo against the bottom of his buttocks, slipping it just between and letting it sit, then reached around him to take his hand off his cock so that she could take it in hand herself. Her chin rested on his shoulder. “I’ve wanted to try this for a while.”

“Yeah?” David laughed, but it came out strained.

She positioned the dildo where she needed it. “Yeah.”

“Since when?”

“Since you left me forever.”

And, before he had time to respond, she pushed in, slipping it as far as it would go. It _hurt,_ and David couldn’t help the strangled noise in his throat, or the way his body tensed. He _could_ turn off the pain, but what would be the fun in that?

At the same time, her hand moved up his cock, thumb playing at the tip. Though her movements were slow, every push in sent a new wave through him. He squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating enough to make sure that there was enough fluid to smooth out the friction. He could do that, here, where everything was an illusion.

His breaths came shallowly, and every thrust had him pausing to grunt. “So - this is a - a revenge fuck.”

She dragged her teeth along the side of his neck, and he shivered. “I wanted to see what you were like, like this. Unable to run from me again.” Another thrust.

Another grunt. She dug deep into him, deeper than he ever remembered anyone else doing. Like she knew him _that_ well. “I wouldn’t run,” he panted.

“No. But since I can’t have this from Legion, I wanted to get this from _you.”_ She pulled back, stopping for a moment. “Why? Do you not like this?”

 _“No - Yes!”_ he blurted. “I do - I -”

She speared him again, and this time, it went even deeper, and he yelled, too loud. “Good.”

His guts felt like they were halfway up his stomach. _“Jesus,_ Syd.”

But she didn’t go any easier on him. She only sped up, now that the friction had eased into almost nothing inside of him. David felt simultaneously like he was being torn to shreds from the inside out and opened up inside to something far hotter and more passionate about her than he had ever known before. He didn’t hate it.

But soon, she began to slow, and David knew that she was losing her stamina. Even in their minds, the real physical boundaries still seemed to affect them. For good measure, he let out another sound, half a whimper and half a groan, and shuddered against her. Her fingers could only do so much.

“Syd,” he panted, pressing his forehead into his arm. “Are you getting tired?”

She didn’t answer. Not for several good thrusts, as hard as she could make them - so hard that David almost crawled up the wall, it sent him so high. “Take over.”

He peeled himself from the wall, and Syd pulled out, earning herself a soft hiss. In another moment, she was down on her back on the soft carpet next to the rug, the strap on nowhere in sight, and David on top of her, the tip of his cock already resting inside. “You’re still wet,” he whispered, leaning down to run his lips down her chest, his tongue prodding at a nipple.

She stirred on the carpet and he stopped, looking down at her questioningly. She only smiled up at him and wiggled. “You excite me,” she purred.

“I would hope so.” He moved his hips forward. It went easy and fast, and soon, he was moving, the same way she had just moved, watching as her expression changed from relaxed to open-mouthed. There were nights at the commune, when he was all alone, where he had touched himself to the thought of that very expression.

It tugged at him now. He wanted more, so he brushed his thoughts over hers, tangling them together, colouring their every feeling until any pleasure he felt, she could feel, and any pleasure she felt, he could feel.

And as they moved, caught in their intimacy, they thought and felt as one, both tightened around the other and pushing into the other, so that neither knew who the other was, or whether their thoughts were truly their own - and it didn’t matter.

Together like this, they climbed to their climax together, breathing in together and sighing out together. He tensed, and she tensed, and then they were coming, a tangled mix of full-body quakes and gut-emptying fire as they both gushed and clenched, unknowing as to who was who and what was what and not giving a single care but that they were together and the same and two bodies interlocked as one, of one mind. Separate minds, and yet the same, just for a moment.

When they were finished, David pulled out, rolling off of Syd and settling them both in the bed in a blink, clean and comfortable and no longer aching where they _would_ ache, if they were in their physical bodies. Since they weren’t, David could tweak their reality to however he liked it - and he liked it to be as comfortable and calming as possible, for them both.

He laid there on his stomach for a long stretch of time, an arm pulled over his eyes, listening to the sound of her stirring. Slowly, he lifted his head, turning it so that he could look at her.

She was lying on her back, her head facing the other direction so that all David could see was the line of her jaw, silhouetted in the dim light. Her hair rested lightly over her neck and her shoulder, spreading out across the pillows like wisps of clouds curled around the fabric, soft and gentle. If he reached out, he thought for sure every strand would disappear entirely. Her chest moved with every slow breath she took, and he could feel the soft buzz of activity from her mind, covered with a thick buzz that signalled she was asleep.

David didn’t feel tired, too distracted by the fact that he was here with her again - _touching_ her again - to want to sleep. In time, he felt Divad’s and Dvd’s familiar pull, and he opened his eyes and looked to his side of the bed.

Sure enough, they were there, Dvd with a furrow in his brow and Divad watching Syd with a curious expression. Both wore the same white suits, and both were brimming with the urge to talk to him.

“Before you talk,” David said to the both of them, “I know what you’re going to say. And before you say it, yes, I didn’t do anything to her mind. She’s in our mind, but she’s herself. Last time was a mistake. I know that now.”

“But you did it,” Dvd said. “You thought it through, and you did it. Raped her. Because, for some reason, you thought it was a good idea.”

David felt bile creep up his throat at the word. He swallowed it down, levelling his gaze at him. “Don’t say it like that.”

“Oh, come the fuck _on,_ man. That’s exactly what you did.”

He knew. “At the time, I didn’t think of it like that, and besides: I thought you didn’t like her anyw -”

“People change,” Divad interjected. David looked at him and, for a moment, saw and felt nothing but judgement radiating from his direction, and he knew that Divad was making a jab at him. “And he’s not the one making excuses for what you did.”

“You’re on his side now?”

Divad scoffed. Behind him, Dvd crossed over to the other side of the bed to look at Syd, who couldn’t hear a word they were saying. “We’re all on the same side, kiddo. The difference is, _you_ were the one who decided to leave that room so you could go screw her without -”

 _“I know,”_ David snapped, as his nerves bubbled in his stomach and up his chest. “I’m not going to do it again. It was wrong, it was _wrong_ to do that.” He had hurt her, and he wasn’t going to do it again. Not now that he knew. Not now that she loved him, even after everything - because she did. He was sure of it. If this Syd still loved him, then so did his. “I made sure she knew what was happening this time. I know what to do now. I want her to love me - present Syd, _our…_ Syd - to love me, the right way.”

Divad raised a brow and Dvd stayed silent, waiting for him to continue.

“No secrets.” He raised his hand, looking at the lines that crossed it. “She told me that once, and I didn’t listen to her.” He’d lied, and what had that gotten him? A dead sister, a best friend made from the physical form of that dead sister, and every single person who had ever tried to help him turned against him. “And then, you know, everything fell to shit. I tried to keep things from Syd by wiping her memory, and ended up… ended up raping her. I’m done with secrets.”

For a long moment, Divad merely stared at him, something deeply judgemental drilling into him from the very depths of his eyes. The very depths of his mind, probably, where David couldn’t touch. Their mind, like the inside of a department store, were sectioned off. One corner for himself, one corner for Divad, and one corner for Dvd. Sometimes, they overlapped, and they could pass freely through one section to the other - like now, for instance, when they all sat around and spoke to each other while their body lay unconscious somewhere else. But other times, they were separated, as though the ceiling had collapsed and blocked their view from one another. None of them could step around the fallen ceilings. Their own, private minds. No secrets, but not entirely exposed, either, David had learned. He was happy to have a little part for himself, even if he had to share the rest.

Then Divad blinked, and the look vanished, replaced with a lopsided grin. “Good.”

“You can’t afford to lie to her again,” said Dvd, moving back from the bed. “She might give you another chance, but lying will just screw it all up again. So don’t be an idiot.”

“And don’t change the story,” Divad added.

“I won’t.” David looked toward Syd, settling back down on the bed. “It’s like you said. People change. I get it. I can change. I love her.”

Dvd and Divad exchanged a look. When David blinked, they were gone.

He returned his attention to Syd, who was still sleeping peacefully next to him. This Syd had encountered the worst version of him - but it was the version without the memory wipe, without the drugging. For all he knew, he could be the worst version.

Or could have been, if he hadn’t come here. Or if he had come here and they had refused to teach him. If he returned and told Syd what happened, let her know that he had changed, that he knew what he did, that he was sorry, that he never wanted to hurt her again… then maybe they still had a chance. Maybe they could still save love.

His gaze trailed down to her shoulders, and then to her arm, coming to rest at the stump. It was just as she had wanted it to be, but surely, she couldn’t have wanted to be without a hand and forearm before.

He had to ask. Now, before he left to fight Legion. Before he could find out how she had lost her arm, and how, if she would in his timeline, he could stop it. Everything: he wanted to know everything.

 _“Syd?”_ He felt like an eight-year-old at a sleepover, the way he whispered the words like someone could hear him.

Her words caused her mind to shift, and then she was awake. “Hmm?” She drew in a long breath through her nose, stretched her legs beneath the covers, and turned her head to look at him. Her gaze, although bright, still held her drowsiness.

“Can I ask you something?”

She smiled lazily. “You just did.”

“Don’t be that person,” David groaned softly. He twisted himself onto his side, facing her, and pillowed his cheek on his arm. “It’s a personal question.”

She blinked. Her smile didn’t fade, but the teasing glint in her eye had disappeared. “More personal than what we just did?”

Sighing, David moved his arm between them, looking down at his fingers as he pressed at the bubbles in the sheets. She was right. A personal question didn’t match up to making love, by a wide margin. But his heart still knocked against his ribcage. He swore that she could hear it from where she lay. Maybe she felt it, too. “I guess not. I wanted to ask… what happened to your arm?”

Syd pursed her lips. She looked up at the ceiling, her expression solemn and distant, and stayed silent for several long seconds. “Do you remember how I was telling you about that fight, when Kerry died?”

His gaze stayed on her arm. “Yeah.”

“Well, that wasn’t all that happened. It was a bad fight. A bunch of people died. And then… Kerry went in, and Legion was still killing people. I thought I could go in real fast and tell everyone to pull back, before he wiped us all out completely. Cary had already made one of those wristbands, you know, like what you had, when you first got here, to cancel my powers out so that I didn’t touch someone and swap bodies. It was supposed to work on his powers, too - he wasn’t supposed to be able to read my mind. But he knew where I was, when I went in, and… I don’t know, the wristband was still an early model, and it didn’t work, and he found me, and he… caught me.” She blinked at the ceiling and frowned, shaking her head. David had half a mind to stop her from saying anymore, but she continued before he could. “He… stopped everything going on around us. Just froze it, just like that. And, um… before I had time to think, he was flinging all these things at me, so I ran to the nearest person and I touched them.” She grimaced. “I managed to get away before he realised we had swapped - he was adamant on hurting my body, not my mind. I didn’t see what happened, but I guess Legion left them for dead. He wanted to make me suffer.”

She fell silent and shut her eyes, and silence stretched through the room for a long, long moment.

“And then,” she finally said, “a few hours later, I swapped back into my body. I was on a plane, flying back to one of our retreats, and my arm was gone.”

David did nothing for a moment, simply watching her arm as she pressed it against her body. He turned his arm onto its side, curling his fingers into his palms and trying to imagine what it would be like if he didn’t have it anymore. He doubted Divad and Dvd would be very happy about it, if they suddenly woke up to find that they were missing an arm. “Did it hurt?”

“Yeah, it hurt. Really bad.” She looked toward him, her eyes roaming across his face, reading his expression. “I didn’t know what I’d come back to, or even that I’d come back at all.”

So that made two of them: David, with his other personalities taking him over, and Syd, with her body swapping. “But you did.” If she had died, because of him - because of some other _version_ of him - then his timeline would have gone exactly like this. “You came back to your body, and then you came back to the past, and you saved me from becoming like him. Even if it was at a bad time, and weird, and… traumatising.”

A soft smile spread across her lips. “And now we’re here.” She looked soft and vulnerable. She looked like someone David wanted to protect for the rest of his life, even though he knew she didn’t need the help.

He opened his mouth to say something, but shook her head and climbed back down beneath the covers, and he had no choice but to follow her. In a moment, she moved nearer to him, pulling the covers up to their sides and resting her arm across his stomach.

“I’ll miss you,” she murmured, playing her fingers around his wrist and pulling it closer to his side.

“I’ll miss you too.” He meant that. “You’ve taught me things. You’ve taught me about… my _brain,_ and my… my powers, and controlling them, and… I know what I have to do. I don’t know how I’m going to get past Farouk, but… we’ll get there, right?”

“You will. You know things now.” She drew him just a little bit closer to her and pressed her lips to his shoulder.

In return, he turned his head, resting his chin on her head. “Thanks for everything.”

“I love you.”

He shut his eyes. “I love you too. So much.”


	7. Keep Me Warm, Let Me Wear Your Coat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> David fights Legion.

_“Right,” David said, moving away from the front of the board so that the other two could see his crudely made scribble of a plan. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You two are going to stay with me.” He gestured to the paper, where he had drawn one large circle and two smaller circles, all surrounded by a large oval. On top of the oval read: SYSTEM. “The front of the line, both sides of me, one on top and one on bottom, left brain and right brain - I don’t care what you want to call them. It’s important that you stay and that I can hear you and feel whatever emotions you feel in the moment. That way, if I need any help, or if you want to chime in with something, you can. All right? We all know three heads - minds, whatever - are better than one.”_

_Dvd stood beside Divad next to the side of the bed, his arms crossed and his head tilted. “Yeah, I’ve got a question. Why do_ you _get to be the one in charge while the two of us sit on the sidelines?”_

_“Because I’m the one in charge most of the time on the outside.”_

_“Since when does that make you the be-all-and-end-all of everything that goes on inside our head?”_

_Divad scoffed, turning to Dvd. “Would you quit trying to challenge everything he says? He’s clearly got everything under control, and he’s the part of us called David -”_

_“- which is who we are on the outside, most of the time,” David cut in. “It makes me the guy in charge because I’m the one they told everything to. Not you.” That would have been the last of it, but Dvd aimed an irritated, baffled look at him. “You know. Whenever I came to after you guys were out, they asked me who I was. And then, when I told them, they told everything they told you guys. Thanks for telling me everything, by the way.”_

_“We would have,” Divad said, “if they hadn’t beaten us to it.”_

_Dvd crossed his arms tighter. He stepped away from the bed, making his way to the board and looking over the drawing. “So you want us to stay up here with you, and help you out when you need it.”_

_David leaned against the wall. “If we want to win against Legion, then we’re going to have to work together.”_

_Divad tilted his head. “He’s right. We’ve been working together this long in training. Time to put our all into it so that we don’t almost die again.”_

_“I could’ve had him,” Dvd argued, “except our friends showed up to stop him just in time. I was trying to help, not trying to get us killed. Besides, I had to fight against my future self, so that didn’t exactly help things. They all think they know more than us.”_

_“They used to,” Divad pointed out._

_David shook his head, waving at the two of them to break their quarrel. “Okay, you know what, guys? It’s fine. We know what we need to do now. We know how to work things out between us, right? That’s what we should be paying attention to.” He hit his palm on the board. “So this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to work together. If I can’t handle it, I know you all can, but we’re going to control our body and our powers together. It’s the only way we can win this. Capisce?” He held his hands out._

_“You bet, baby.” Divad moved away from the bed, stretching his arms behind his head. “No one’s getting past is. Not even Future Us.” He took David’s hand._

_Dvd drew in a breath. He almost looked like he was about to argue against it, but that was only his angry demeanour glaring through. After a moment, he took David’s other hand. “I’m in. But I’m the strongest out of all of us, so if you need to kick his ass in some bad situation, I’ll be the one to do that.”_

_“Need all the help we can get from all the people we can get,” David said, as he let their hands go. “No more confusion. Just us three. The three amigos.”_

_Divad stepped back. “The three musketeers.”_

_“The three stooges,” Dvd muttered, turning away. But David swore he could see him smiling._

* * *

He had made it out of the hideout without being noticed. Legion was off on the other side of the world, and had flashed on the screens when Clark had come to get him. He’d found a few people who had thought they were safe - and David hadn’t stayed to see what had become of them.

They had sent him to a remote location several thousand miles away, somewhere smack in the middle of the island of Japan, where they said Legion spent most of his time. Why he spent his time _there,_ David had no idea. He had never personally been to Japan in his life, and he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be interested in staying there in the future. Least of all spend most of his time there.

But he hadn’t asked, and they hadn’t told him.

So now he was here, standing in front of a giant structure that looked half a castle and half a prison, and wholly like something Legion would hide out in. The stone walls, like the buildings in the abandoned cities he had visited when he’d first arrived, were stained and chipped. A wide staircase led up to an arched wooden doorway. Some of the steps were missing, while others were covered in building wreckage and toppled trunks of trees.

He suddenly felt uneasy. _I don’t like this,_ he thought.

_Neither do the two of us,_ Dvd replied, _but we have to do it._

_What if he takes us off guard?_

_He won’t._ Divad, cocky as ever, sent him a wave of confidence that faded as quick as it flooded him. _We’re keeping lookout. And besides, you’re psychic._

_So is he._

Sucking in a deep breath, David climbed the stairs, shuffling to avoid the crumbled concrete and fallen statues that blocked his path. Halfway up, he lost his patience and teleported the rest of the way to the entrance. From there, he stepped inside, glancing around at the ornate walls, lined with glistening gold and marbled floors and painted ceilings that were fourth feet high and propped by large, decorated pillars. He felt as though he had stepped out of an apocalyptic world straight into a palace from in the 1800s. Or maybe it was the 1700s. He had never bothered keeping history and time periods.

Given that he was in the future now, maybe he _should._

“Legion?” he called. His voice echoed through the long, open hall. Then it faded into nothing, with not a single answer back.

He felt out with his mind again. Sure enough, a single shred of power pinged back at him. He followed it through several open doorways, each of which led deeper into the palace. The farther in he went, the higher the ceiling climbed, until, eventually, he entered into a large, circular chamber without a ceiling or a roof at all. Or, rather, it _was_ a ceiling, curved upwards in the center in the shape of a dome, but so many large holes stretched across it that it looked more like a giant, solid spider’s web than it did a roof. Sunlight streamed into the chamber, making it easy for David to see where he was going. Around him were rows and rows of chairs, ringing around the walls and all the way down, until they circled a large floor. This looked like an auditorium, or an indoor amphitheater fit for the Romans. Magnificent, at one time, but forgotten now, abandoned, and left for the weather to erode away into nothing.

Which was strange, given the fact that the outer walls were padded with red carpet and cushions and the seats were perfectly clean, as though no rain or wind had ever touched them since the moment they had been put in here.

_What do we say this place is?_ he thought.

Dvd responded first. _A prison, and probably a trap._

_A place where you can concentrate better?_ Divad murmured. _It’s big, and there’s plenty of room to move. The chairs aren’t a problem, because we can levitate. Float._

Dvd clicked his tongue. _It’s probably a trap, and you two aren’t even remotely worried we’re about to die?_

David ran his fingers along the tops of the seats as he trotted down the steps. _I’m always worried._

He made his way to the center of the theatre. In the center of the theatre, he turned full circle, his gaze sweeping all of the chairs that faced inward toward him, and imagined what it would be like if every seat was filled. Would they cheer for him? Or would they throw rocks and tomatoes and leftovers at the floor, shrieking for him to leave?

He shook his head and wiped the thought from his mind, craning his neck and looking straight up instead, out past the thinly bridged dome roof and into the sky. At night, when everything was still and quiet and dark, and the stars gleamed down from the sky, the view from here must be better than anything in the world: the moonlight streaming in and outlining the chairs with white light, and stars twinkling above.

“It’s fascinating, isn’t it?”

David almost jumped clear out of his skin. The voice came from somewhere to his side, so he spun to meet it.

Legion sat in one of the chairs several rows up from the center, his legs draped and crossed over an arm of his chair, his shoulder leaned against the back. His hair still stood taller. He wore a sleeveless shirt that looked something like a vest of purple cloth, covered with sky blue swirls that had David blinking several times before he could make sense of what they were. His long pants matched his shirt, and the bottoms flared out widely, so that they hung loosely by Legion’s uncovered feet.

On his face was an amused smirk. “This place, I mean.” He gestured out to the amphitheatre. “It’s fascinating. You can look up into the sky whenever you like and see the stars, if you look close enough.”

The sunlight from above began to dim. David looked up.

Above them, the sky slowly faded into darkness. For a moment, everything was pitch black, and David, on high alert, suddenly tensed, ready for Legion to attack. But there was no assault: only stars, as they suddenly blinked into existence, one by one, then faster, until the sky was filled with constellations. David could see Cepheus, and Ursa Minor below it, and Draco, curling farther down.

“Those were our friends, once,” Legion said. He stretched in his seat. “They used to talk to us so often.”

“They didn’t talk,” David muttered, suddenly bitter. He missed the stars as much as Legion did - if Legion even missed them at all. “It was my powers. It was me, hearing people’s thoughts. Thinking they were the stars talking to me. But they didn’t talk.”

“Ah, but it _wasn’t_ your powers that made them speak. Or, shall I say, not _our_ powers that made them speak. We heard them. They spoke. But we were so far out in the woods, back at home. We only had our father nearby whose thoughts we could hear, and he would never think things like that.” Legion shut his eyes, resting his head against the back of his chair. “Don’t you miss them?”

David wasn’t about to take this. Clearly, he missed them, and Legion knew it. He wanted to throw David off his tracks. “Stop bullshitting me. I came here because I wanted to talk to you.”

Legion’s eyes roamed around the chamber, stopping on David. His gaze was piercing, but he still wore a smug smile that suggested he didn’t really care. “Where’ve you been?”

David felt the guards around his mind solidify: Divad, pushing another layer around it for extra protection. “Away,” he said. “Recovering. You almost killed me.” Legion couldn’t possibly read his mind right now. He didn’t want to give anyone away. Even _if_ he was planning on ending this all here and now, on the off-chance that Legion ended up killing him, he didn’t want for the others to get caught because of his stupidity. Better to keep as many people safe in this timeline as possible.

“You do know,” Legion said, moving his legs off the chair arm and standing, “that I scanned the world trying to find you? And I didn’t find you until now.”

“Looks like I’m only detectable when I want to be detected.”

Laughing dryly, Legion teleported several rows down, next to the innermost chair. He leaned his hip against it and crossed his arms. “Where were you?” he repeated.

David clenched his teeth and stood his ground. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

“Oh, please. Drop the clichés. We both know you’re not going to make it out of here alive, so you may as well tell me. You have nothing to lose, except your life, which you’re going to end up losing anyways.”

_He’s bullshitting you,_ said Dvd.

David tapped his teeth. _“Or,_ better idea: you could just let me go. Send me back to where I belong and continue on living here, where _you_ belong.”

“Our ideals are too different. We figured that out last time we met.” With a sigh, Legion straightened himself up again. He folded his arms behind his head and looking up at the stars, and for a moment, he didn’t say anything at all, but stood and admired the stars as if they were his own. “I wish they weren’t. You and I could have done wonderful things together.”

David scoffed. “Oh yeah? Wonderful things? Like what, making friends with people, keeping them all in a camp, and then killing them when they questioned how wrong you were?”

“If I remember correctly, you haven’t been very nice to the people who said you were wrong. You abandoned them.” Legion’s eyes twinkled. David blamed that on the stars. “You left a bunch of people who only wanted the best for you.”

“Don’t pretend like you’re the pinnacle of piety right now!” David snapped. He couldn’t be serious. “I have a hell of a better track record than you do when it comes to ‘number of confirmed innocent kills.’”

“You want a prize?” Legion dropped his arms and looked back at him. “Why does any of that matter in this timeline?”

“Because killing innocent people is _wrong.”_

“I wouldn’t exactly call the hundreds of thousands… the millions of people who agreed with the ones who wanted me dead ‘innocent.’”

“Misled people aren’t guilty.”

Legion gave him a questioning look, his brow twitching. He drew in a breath, as though he were going to say something, and then decided against it, instead nodding in agreement and looking back up at the stars. David didn’t trust the gesture by any means, and he stepped forward.

“What does that -”

And then Legion’s psychic attack hit him, so hard that he went staggering back, tumbling over his feet. He caught himself before he fell, and regained his balance. Pain pulsed from his forehead down the bridge of his nose and into his cheekbones. It bled around his mind - though not through it - and forced a faint headache into existence.

All of it happened in an instant. But in that instant, David felt Dvd tug at their power, twisting everything he could muster and throwing it right back against Legion’s mind.

Legion wasn’t using his full potential. He couldn’t be. This was too easy. This was too clean.

He shoved Legion’s power back, strengthening the barriers around his mind. Divad wrapped something heavy, like sap, over his mind, and his headache faded. He saw Legion open his mouth to comment, but decided, in a split second decision, not to let him speak at all. He threw an arm out, sending a telekinetic wave at Legion that threw him off his feet and into the air.

Legion went crashing onto one of the chairs. Before he could tumble over another, he disappeared.

Silence. Then -

“You really _are_ trying to stop me, aren’t you?” Legion spoke from behind David, and before David could spin around to face him, he threw an invisible force straight at him that knocked him forward.

David stumbled, catching himself with his powers before he fell and floating lightly back to his feet. He felt another wave shoot toward him, but he felt Dvd deflect it before it hit him. With a sharp intake of breath, he turned around, balling his hands into fists. “Of course I’m trying to stop you, when you’re the one trying to kill me!”

Legion grinned crookedly, his eyes dark. “Oh, David. You’ve changed. Trying to kill your own twin without a second thought. Making me think _I’m_ the bad guy, that _I’m_ the one who should feel guilty for what I’ve done. All this power, and you’re taking it all the wrong way. Using it the wrong way.”

“I’m not the one who’s changed!” David snapped. _“You’re_ the one who changed! You’re the one who killed Farouk and killed everyone else and turned against your friends and _destroyed_ this world! You’re not a good guy.”

“I never was.” Legion stepped closer. His grin widened, and his eyes narrowed. “You never were. In this timeline, what I did was always going to happen. Syd only delayed it from happening.”

David’s nerves flared at the fronts of his arms and prickled at his palms, but he wasn’t about to let Legion gain the upper hand. He knew better, now. “You’re wrong. And do you want to know how I know that?”

He also knew better than to explain himself to someone who would never understand.

While Legion assumed that he was going to say something in answer, he was already gathering his powers in his mind to attack. When Legion opened his mouth, David shot a bolt straight at him. In a split second, Legion had vanished from his spot - and in the same second, David felt Legion’s power beginning to encase him, attempting to freeze him where he stood. He sent a mental knife straight through it, broke free, and teleported behind a row of chairs, where he crouched, eyes shut. His mind buzzed, stretching across the entire amphitheatre to track where Legion was at the moment.

Currently, Legion was on the other side, against the farthest wall. He laughed loudly, and it echoed around the chamber. “You’re not seriously stupid enough to think you can hide from me?”

From somewhere behind David, a wall cracked. He knew, without looking, that something was about to come toppling down over him, so he ducked and rolled beneath the row of chairs behind him. A large chunk of the wall slammed into the seat above him, caving it in.

Before it could squish him, David teleported behind Legion, lunging at him and curling an arm around his neck. “Just die quietly,” he hissed between clenched teeth.

Legion disappeared, reappearing several feet across from him, his back straight, his arms folded behind him. The swirls on his shirt seemed almost to move on their own. “You’re an idiot.”

Instantly, the dark sky above them switched back to day. The sudden change blinded David, but he could feel the psychic disruption just to his side. Legion probably thought he would be too distracted to notice it. But he did, and he manifested an invisible force field around him half a second before several chairs slammed against it. Behind him, more chairs flew at him, screeching loudly as they were ripped from their places and hurled toward him. Every one hit the field and fell loudly to the floor.

David turned to Legion, intending to spit fire at him and strike back.

All he got was a second of shock, before a large chunk of the amphitheatre floor collided with his field. He felt the pressure of the hit in his mind, bearing down on him like a heavy weight, as though something had struck him in the head, except it was the _inside_ of his head that smarted with the pain. He bent his fingers, squeezing his power around the floor, and it shimmered and shifted into a tiny piece of metal before falling to the floor.

He let the force field disintegrate. “Whoops. Looks like you’ve got to learn how to fight me all over again!”

“That’s okay,” Legion said, from somewhere behind him - and above him. “I know how you work.”

David turned and looked up.

Twenty feet in the air, Legion floated, his loose pants covering all of both feet but his toes. His arms were outstretched to either side, and behind him floated the fragments of several other chairs that he had torn from their hinges. Seats, backs, and bent pieces hovered in the air, ready to be sent in whichever direction he liked. “Why wouldn’t I?” he asked darkly. “We’re both the same person, only… distinctly experienced.” He threw an arm out, and the chairs came tumbling around him, shooting straight towards David.

David was ready. He launched his own power out, touching upon each of the chairs in a split second and forcing them to swerve away from him and around in a half-circle, right back toward Legion. He could feel Legion’s power pushing back, trying to shimmy the grasp of his powers from the chairs, but he kept his hold, forcing Legion’s powers back.

Legion curled inwards, covering himself with a force field of his own. The chairs hit and scattered, clattering against the walls and falling to the ground.

David raised a hand, keeping a field between them. “Why can’t you just see that you’re the one in the wrong?! It’s wrong to kill people, in any timeline! In _every_ timeline!”

Slowly, Legion lowered himself down several feet. He kept himself in the air, dropping his arms to his side and tilting his head, watching David thoughtfully. “Mark Twain once spoke on something called a Primal Curse. A curse of man. And do you know what that curse was?” He cleared his throat and, without waiting for David to ask, continued: “‘The infliction upon man of the Moral Sense; the ability to distinguish good from evil; and with it, the ability to do evil; for there can be no evil act without the presence of consciousness of it in the doer of it.’ Human beings are the only creatures on earth who discern right from wrong and good from evil. They believe that there is inherent Good in some things, and inherent Bad in other things. But we - we mutants - aren’t human. We’re more than human. Higher than human. We’re _better_ than their so-called _ability_ for good and evil. Why should we listen to something only humans dictate?”

“Because you’re making everyone else’s lives miserable!” David snapped impatiently. “Because we _need_ that dichotomy so that the entire world doesn’t fall to _shit!”_

“I’ve told you before, David: I wasn’t the one who caused this mess!” Legion scowled, crossing his arms. _“They_ were. I didn’t plan any of this. I didn’t wake up one morning and think, ‘Gee, I think I’ll go out and kill everyone because I feel like it.’ They came to me. They came to me and tried to kill me. I did what I had to _do.”_

As he spoke, his eyes began to glow white. His skin, too, glowed: faintly, at first, and then brighter. David didn’t notice it at first, in the light of the sun, but something seemed off. Legion’s voice sounded fainter, as though he were losing the energy to speak. It was the same reaction David had when he head became muddled; when the voices in his head grew louder.

Which meant that Legion was about to let someone else take the reigns. He was weak.

When David realised, he sent his mind out to probe around - to try and get even the faintest taste of who might be trying to come forward.

_Careful,_ Dvd warned, in the same moment Legion drew up his mental shields to keep David out.

“I don’t _care_ what you think about right and wrong anymore,” Legion snarled. Tendrils of red mist curled from his skin and rose into the air. “You - _you_ came here. _You_ came into _my_ life. Not the other way around. You’re just like them. You _hate_ me because of who I am - because of what I did. But what I did was _live.”_ He paused for a moment, and then smirked faintly. He wasn’t entirely there: it was obvious by the way he blinked and looked off at a point just past David. And, with _that_ look, it was disconcerting. “I’m sorry, David, for what we’re about to do.”

David’s hackles raised, and he teleported back a dozen feet, covering himself with the strongest mental field he could muster. He watched as Legion lowered himself to the floor again, glowing against the shadows behind him. He stood tall, and his eyes were shut. David could feel a gentle pressure against his mind before it disappeared again, as quickly as it had come. In that instant, David knew it was different. It wasn’t Legion - or David, or Dvd, or _whoever_ he was at the moment. He couldn’t recognise him, and neither could the other two.

Back on the ground, Legion stood still and unmoving.

Now was David’s chance. He could overtake him while they were still unconscious and trap him inside his own mind while he decided what to do with him. Maybe killing him was out of the question, if it meant turning into a monster. He’d figure something out. Now wasn’t the time to think.

He bolted from his spot: a running start. Then he dove and skipped the distance between them and materialised right by Legion, where the momentum drove him into his body. They tumbled together. Every time David made contact with his doppelgänger’s skin, he felt it like a searing pan. The dark tendrils swirled through the air around them, blowing into David’s face and making his eyes water. Blindly, he reached for Legion’s head, slamming his fist into it.

Two strikes in, a force slammed into his chest, knocking the air out of him and sending him flying back. Another force slammed into his mind in mid-air, and the pain made him scream. When he tried to teleport, pain shot through his mind and into his eyes until he saw stars, so he stopped, letting himself collide into the chairs. His shoulder and side slammed into the backs, and he rolled into a chair, hitting his head on an arm as he came to a halt. His head was splitting.

_I said careful, you moron!_

Then, suddenly, Legion was leaning over the chair in front of him, hovering above him with a sly gleam in his eye and an amused expression on his face. “David.” His voice sounded deeper, and he enunciated the name more clearly, drawing out the first syllable like he was trying to make sure he was saying it right.

Groaning, David rolled forward, falling to the floor with a soft _thump._ He could feel his powers return to him again, clicking into place in his mind. “Fuck off.”

Legion lifted his hand. “You know I never will.”

In the blink of an eye, several things happened at once: something stirred in David’s mind, terrifyingly familiar and yet unrecognisable; in the same instant, a strong heat began to grow in his stomach, spreading widely, up through his chest and out to his sides and down into his legs and his groin; a flashing memory of the night he had left Summerland to rescue Amy, when he had been working in tandem with Farouk, turning every soldier who dared go against him to ashes with a single snap; the fire inside growing stronger, an intense white-hot pressure propelling itself from the inside out, that made David feel like he was about to explode; David, realising he was going to die here, a pile of ashes, if he didn’t do something.

So he did.

Without wasting a second, he gathered every bit of power he had and projected it into the tidal wave that Legion’s mind thrust on him, and then deeper, until he felt their minds brush. With a twist, he projected them both into the Astral Plane: a plain, white, foggy space that hadn’t yet manifested into a visible landscape. Their minds tangled for a moment, but Legion was still reeling from the sudden psychic blast, which meant that David had the upper hand. With a single thought, he created the scenery: darkness stretched around them, above them, and below them, and a horde of stars scattered across the sky, so bright that everything around them was visible. Clouds floated around them and below them, lined by starlight.

They floated, groundless, in this forged night, David lined in green and Legion, lying limply, lined in red.

Before Legion could move, David had transformed himself into a tyrannosaurus. He charged at Legion, opening his jaw to snap him up once and for all. But when he snapped his jaws, nothing crunched between his teeth.

He looked down. Beneath him sat a small, red toad. It hopped behind him and out of sight. With his bulky body, he was slow to turn around.

Pain suddenly blossomed through his tail. He roared, staggering to the side and twisted, flinging his tail to the side. Sharp teeth slipped across his tail, ripping more pain through his body. When he twisted, he saw that Legion had transformed himself again, this time into a lion, and was now tumbling through the air. David slipped into a hawk, launching himself high into the air. Legion was bound to transform himself into another bird to follow after him.

But instead, Legion landed on his four feet and stayed, shaking his mane out and glaring at David, tracking him with his eyes. Then he shut them, shifting into a small knife. As he did, David felt something in the astral plane shift. It came from Legion’s direction - like his consciousness had flickered for a moment and returned.

He had no time to react, because the knife shot straight toward him before he had time to collect his thoughts. He wheeled out of the way. The knife just barely missed his head, whizzing past his ear. It spun in the astral air, and then faced David.

_We’re all here to kill you now!_ sounded a voice around them, but it wasn’t Dvd or Divad. It sounded like a young girl’s voice, no older than ten or eleven. He didn’t recognise it. Because they were surrounded by the Astral Plane, her voice projected clearly around them, as plain as though she had spoken it aloud.

_Who are you?_ he sent back, glancing around. As far as he could tell, only he and Legion were here.

_I’m you! Well, one of you._ The knife spun in the air, and David finally knew who was talking. For a moment, he forget that he was supposed to be putting up a fight.

_Legion?_

She giggled. It echoed in his mind. _Uh uh! I thought you said you_ weren’t _Legion._

David didn’t know what was happening. _I’m not. I’m not anyone but myself. But who are you, really? You’re not Dvd or Divad._

_Nope! I’m new. They say I’m harder to handle than everyone else._

He stepped back, making his way around her in a wide arc. She was new. Not David, not Dvd, not Divad, but someone else entirely. Someone new who had manifested in that mind, to join the others. _What does that mean? How can there be someone new? How does that - no, how old are you?_

She didn’t answer him immediately. Suspicious and on edge, David shifted into a metal shield, intent on keeping himself from being sliced to shreds.

_Sorry,_ she finally sighed, her voice faint. _I have to go now. Bye!_

The knife spun in the air again. It vanished in a cloud of smoke. Then Legion’s concentration flickered again: another swap of consciousness. A moment later, hundreds of tiny bullets, no larger than the tip of a pin, shot toward David. Before he had registered them, they rained against the front of the shield, burning like tiny meteorites to something that felt like his face and his neck and his chest and his stomach, searing straight through him.

His concentration wavered, and as the deluge of pain died, he shifted into a centipede - a large centipede, with a body armoured in thick metal. His face burned, but inside his mind, Divad and Dvd were working to repair the wounds before they slowed him down too much.

The bullets trembled in the air, then flew together fast, gathering together until they again took shape, this time into a large cobra. It hurtled straight at David, its mouth open, its jaw unhinged, and its fangs out, its eyes glistening with Legion’s rage.

Before it reached him, David turned himself into a large boar. He lowered his head, charging forward and tossing his tusks out at Legion. He exploded in half, his body curving to avoid the tusks, a storm of brains and blood and internal organs that hit David in the snout and eyes. Snorting and shaking his head, David whirled to gut Legion before he could resew his guts together.

But the cobra was already far away, floating in the air facing him, body curled around itself, his head tilted. From this distance, David couldn’t see the look in his eye, but the stars in the sky, and the entire Astral Plane, shivered with the other’s confident amusement. “This isn’t the way I envisioned this meeting going.” Again, the voice wasn’t David’s or Dvd’s or Divad’s. But it wasn’t the young girl’s, either. This one was deeper and richer - which was extremely weird, considering it was coming from the mouth of a snake - though still unrecognisable. Another one of the people in Legion’s mind.

David lowered his head, pointing his tusks in Legion’s direction, just in case he decided to attack without warning. “You’re another one of those new, uh… identities, in his head.”

“Christ mighty, kiddo, you’re just like him. Callin’ us fake.” He laughed, and his fangs flashed with the reflections of the stars. “I’m real, and I’m not new.”

“I’m not calling you _fake._ I’m just saying you’re…” David frowned. He tossed his head to the side. “Not alone.”

“Like hell I’m not.” He uncurled, slithering forward, which David matched with a step back and a hunch of his shoulders. “I’m the one who should get every chance to come out and play. I’m not attached like _some_ of them. I’ve been around since they left Division Three, and I knew enough about everything that they all need my opinion. You’re welcome very much. See, the thing about this is, Divad’s right, what he told you. There’s a lot of us, with a lot of powers. More than you can imagine.”

_You think he’s bluffing?_ Dvd murmured.

Divad’s presence grew stronger behind David’s. _No. He’s telling the truth._

_How are we supposed to beat him?_ David asked.

_Carefully._

“Can you just get to the point?” David barked.

The snake hissed, stretching up. “I told you. You’re just like them. Well, fine then. But you’re not going to beat us. Not when you deserve to die for going against us.” And then the snake was gone, replaced by a sabretooth tiger. It charged at David, baring its teeth.

David shifted back into his astral form. This time, he wore a hard hat and held an unnaturally long restraining pole. In one fell swoop, he shoved the loop over Legion’s head and pulled it taut.

Legion was tugged backwards and off his feet. He morphed into a slippery eel, shocking David through the pole and slipping out of the loop.

Hissing in pain, David dropped the pole and staggered back. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Legion change into a cannon, accompanied closely yet again by a shift in consciousness. He felt Dvd slip his way in where he had temporarily left vulnerable, changing them into a fighter jet and launching upwards, just in time to miss the cannonball that Legion fired their way. Then David was back in control, zooming across the sky and racing back to face Legion.

He was too slow. Whoever it was in control of Legion this time had fast reflexes, and before David could get himself turned around, he was hit in the side by a huge, flaming fireball that knocked him right off his path and sent him spinning. The fire spread over the top and bottom of the jet’s body, and it felt just the same as if someone had set his flesh on fire.

This time, Dvd and Divad yanked loose his control. They worked in synchrony and agony, squeezing their body into a small rock and dropping out of the fire. Then it changed into a giant hose, large enough that, when it shot water out to douse the fire, it covered Legion’s flame completely and flooded him out.

Legion changed into a dense fog, rolling away from them, back several yards, before changing back into a lion. This time, both his mane and his fur were black. “Cool, man, cool! You’re going to get your ass singed if you try and fight us for much longer!”

Yet another identity David hadn’t met yet. Female, this time - he could feel her presence floating through the Astral Plane like it was his own identity thwacking around in his mind - but older than the other who had spoken to him. A chaotic presence, harbouring white-hot power that smouldered through the atmosphere.

David didn’t recognise her voice, but she felt so _familiar._ _Lenny?_

“That’s what the others thought too.” She laughed, lifting her head. Her mane drifted behind her, blown by an invisible wind. “Nope. I’m part of us.”

His face hurt, but he grasped control back from Divad and Dvd, shifting into a large elephant. Legion’s attack had left him so mentally wounded that he couldn’t bother patching himself up. His tusks were chipped and melted, and large third-degree burns covered the surface of his trunk and his face, as well as around his back and sides. But this was safer than being attacking by a lion and choked out as a hose. “You want to kill me, too?”

“We’re in sync. You ever felt like that with your buddies?” She nodded upwards, but took a step toward him.

_Low blow!_ Dvd grumbled.

He stood his ground. “Why do you care?”

“Because you’re never going to win if you don’t get in sync.” And then, laughing harshly, she charged at him, snapping her teeth. Her black mane turned blindingly bright, and then shot off her body as a raging fire.

David hadn’t expected it. The flames struck him, burning his smarting trunk and face. He screamed, panicked, and compressed himself into a boulder, dropping out of the flames and plummeting through the Plane.

The atmosphere shifted as Legion switched again. David didn’t recognise who it was, but he knew it must be someone new, again. As he began to transform back into his astral body, a weighted anchor struck him from above. Stars burst behind his eyelids.

Dvd just managed to pull him out of his form again, changing into a large Spartan. He took hold of the anchor, spinning it around like an Olympic athlete and hurling it as far away as he possibly could.

Another shift; Legion changed into a crocodile, swimming through the air to snap at David. In turn, David changed into another dinosaur, this time four-legged and low to the ground, hard-scales with rows of teeth. He hooked his jaw over Legion’s snout, biting down hard. Legion struggled, then flattened into a sword, slicing up at the roof of his mouth. David screamed, tasting blood, and staggered back.

Again, Legion switched identities, transforming into a jaguar. They bit into David’s neck, shaking him like a rag doll. David choked, and, this time, Divad shoved him aside, morphing into an anaconda and wrapping around Legion’s upper jaw. He launched himself toward Legion’s body, yanking their upper snout back until it bent unnaturally. He was rewarded with a scream.

And then, suddenly, Legion was out from his grip, and he faced a giant fan that blasted him away, into an invisible wall. He slammed back against it, falling down to an invisible ground.

This time, David was the one to shuffle back in control while he recovered from the blow to the back of his head. He glanced up toward Legion, several yards away now.

Legion had begun to glow red. The light spread until it completely covered them, then brightened into white, then grew in size, larger and larger, until it stretched and towered over David, twisting and curling and transforming into a shape more human than animal.

Except it wasn’t human.

When the light finally faded, what faced David was something he had never seen before.

It was a terrifying thing. The top half was human, and wore Legion’s face and knowing grin and gravity-defying hair that stretched higher than his head was tall, and when he grinned, David could clearly see that his canines and back teeth were sharper than normal. But the bottom half was anything _but_ human. His upper arms were still normal, but near his elbow, his skin began to darken and sprout more hair. His hands were completely black, and his fingers were long and terrible and reminded David of the Devil with the Yellow Eyes, whose fingers had been just as long and sharp. On his chest and his shoulders and his neck were eyes of all shapes and colours and sizes, all watching David. Some looked cheerful, some looked forlorn, and others looked furious.

All of this was shocking, but what shocked him the most was what lingered from Legion’s stomach down. Where there should have been very human legs, instead, there was a dark torso that bent back behind him and gave way to six dark spider’s legs. Four legs stood in the back, keeping Legion upright, while two more stuck out from his torso, bent forward, stretched toward David as though they wanted to reach out and pick him up and squeeze the life out of him.

David knew better than to ignore the striking similarity between this new creature and the horrible spider that Farouk had turned into during their fight in the desert -

And then, suddenly, as though some veil of wool had been tugged from deep inside his thoughts, he knew what had caused that familiar tug in his mind.

No. Underneath everything, this still had to be Legion. It still had to be _him_ there.

By now, David had recovered, and he made himself twice as large, shifting into an armoured barred owl. Still, he didn’t come to twice the size of this monster. Instead of wasting his powers on making himself huge, he spun around and flew back another few yards, until he was a comfortable distance from the monster he faced now.

He sent out a question from his mind: _Who are you?_

The spider creature with Legion’s face laughed. “I told you, David. I’m better than you could ever be.” He didn’t speak with a single voice, but a multiplicity of voices, so that David couldn’t really tell whether he was hearing anyone speak at all. “I’ve learned things and done things that you can only dream of. If only you had killed Farouk… you could have become like us, too.”

_Us?_ David hovered where he was, staring him down. _Who’s ‘us’?_

“Who you should have been all along. Your full potential is us.” The creature smiled darkly, maliciously, resting his long fingers on his chest. “And I am the one who orchestrated it all. I knew from the beginning what you were capable of, but you kicked me out before I could show you. Little did you know that your own powers would welcome me back into your mind, after you killed me.”

David’s mouth went dry. _You’re supposed to be dead. He killed you._

“Death does not always mean the end of an existence. Sometimes, it means the beginning of a new one. Or, perhaps, it was simply a continuation of an old life. A life that ended too soon. Our life together.”

_We never had a life together!_

Farouk sighed, but that smile continued to play at his lips. “Do you remember when you were small? How you walked with King and spoke with King and took comfort in him? A dog you believed was real? Do you remember when you sat, frightened, in your room, in the dark night, staring at the corner by the door, certain that there was a shadow, a monster, watching you? You believed the monster was real, even when everybody else told you it wasn’t - even when _you_ told yourself that it wasn’t. Do you remember when you when you agreed to work together with me? How perfect we were, together, when we went to Division Three to rescue your sister? I was real. Your powers were real. _We_ were real. Just like everyone in your mind is real, and my mind.”

_That’s not your mind. That’s_ his _mind._ David moved to the side, arcing around Farouk in a wide circle. Farouk twisted to keep his gaze on him. _You don’t own his mind. You don’t even have a mind, anymore._

“How do you know?”

David frowned, and the little bristles around his eyes tickled at his skin. He didn’t know for certain. _I know you had to latch yourself - your consciousness - to my mind, twice, in order to survive. You’re not whole. You haven’t been whole since my father killed you, and you’ve always needed_ me _to define yourself ever since. I’m better than you. Always have been, always will be._

That seemed to break Farouk’s amusement. His smile faltered, and then fell completely, into an irritated sneer that spanned across his expression. “You are wrong. You were made stronger because of me. You were weak before. But now, we are together again. This -” He gestured out, with his upper arms and his lower arms, to the astral space around them - “is the right timeline. This is the _true_ timeline. We were destined to be together forever. But that does not define me. You do not define me, David. _I_ define _you.”_

_This timeline is bullshit!_

Stretching his mind - and his astral muscles - David made himself large again. In the course of a second, he had changed from a small hawk to a large armoured exterminator, outlines in the same green as the rest of him. He held a flamethrower, pointed straight at Farouk’s dark torso. “This timeline isn’t my timeline, Farouk,” he hissed. “I don’t have to accept it. Just like I don’t have to accept _you.”_

He flicked the flamethrower on.

White and green and teal flames shot out of the barrel toward Farouk, but Farouk had already anticipated the move. He leapt out of the way, scurrying across the sky as the flames followed just behind him, his eight legs moving so gracefully that David could almost set aside his disgust and appreciate them, for all of one second.

Around and around the sky Farouk went, and around David went, following Farouk with the fire. The stars seemed to wink at him and circle around them in the opposite direction, as comforting as they were taunting. He just wanted this to _end._

At long last, Farouk seemed to tire and stopped. David turned the flamethrower directly at him, and the flames engulfed him instantly. Something like a scream sounded through the fire, and David’s heart skipped a beat out of sheer relief. Finally, _finally,_ Farouk was dead.

But that was too easy.

Before David even registered what was happening, Farouk had lunged out of the flames toward him, still very much ablaze, and stabbed him with one very sharp leg that sapped his energy instantly and wrapped him in a web that trapped his arms against his sides so that he couldn’t move at all. Farouk’s skin, still searing hot from the flames, hurt to even be near, but he couldn’t move away. He could hardly twist, but the more Farouk wrapped him up, the tighter the squeeze, and the less he could move. The webs trapped his calves, his thighs, his hips, his waist, his arms, his neck, all the way up to his jaw, so that he was forced to hold his chin high without the room to turn his head.

Soon, Farouk stopped in front of him. He no longer looked like Legion anymore from the chest up. Now, he looked like Farouk again, which made the smug smile on his face even more galling. He writhed in his bonds, but the webs dug into him whenever he moved.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” David hissed.

Farouk leaned forward, inspecting David’s face. From here, David could see every little detail of his face. The way the red glow outlined him made him look even more menacing. “But I’m not dead. You cannot kill me, no matter how hard you try. You think you want to, but you don’t. You don’t want to kill me.”

“Bullshit.”

“You see for yourself how I stand before you, after you killed me in the desert. How can that be, you wonder.” He lifted a finger to his lips. “It is precisely because we are destined to be together. Our minds are connected. Yours knew this when it pulled me back in. This is what we have become, together.”

Feeling sick, David swallowed down the bile that threatened to spill onto his tongue. “It’s not just you. It’s Dvd. It’s Divad.” He shut his eyes. “You and I - David, whoever he is now - aren’t the only people.”

“And yet, they have lived such a different life from you. We made the world our own. You will too, one day, when you kill me. This will happen to us, too.”

“Never.”

Suddenly, it wasn’t Farouk’s voice speaking to him, but Syd’s. “David, please. You’re broken. You need Farouk to make you whole again.”

David opened his eyes. In front of him stood Syd, both arms intact, hair curling down her arms again in waves, majestic and convincingly real, if not for the soft, red outline around her. She looked at him with eyes full of worry.

“Please,” she said again, stepping in front of him. She placed her hands on either sides of his face, her touch gentle.

The hair on the back of his neck rose and suppressed a shudder. “You’re not Syd.”

“Listen to me. She wasn’t the one who visited you. I was. I just want you to get better, David, and I knew… I knew I had to get you here. To find Farouk, so that you could join with him. So that you could find me.” She ran her thumbs across his cheeks, smiling kindly. Between the tangle of words and names and the caring look in her eyes, David could almost believe this was the truth. “I love you.” And without another word, she leaned in, kissing him softly.

Almost.

He shoved his head forward, slamming their foreheads together. Syd yelped and stumbled back, and David jerked against the webbing, ignoring the pain as the strands dug into his skin and cut his arms and neck. His head hurt too, now, and he took a moment to regain his foggy thoughts. “You’re lying! You didn’t come to me! You didn’t even know I’d come here, till the moment I _got_ here and you - or Legion, or Divad, or _whoever_ it was - felt me, like some disturbance in the psychic force. You don’t know _anything._ And you don’t know me!”

“I know you.” Her voice was firm, but she didn’t sound angry. “I know you better than I know anyone else here, right?”

“You know _Legion,”_ David snapped, turning his head as many centimeters as it would go to the side and looking off into the night. “You’ve been out of my head for years now. You don’t know me anymore. You don’t get to know me anymore. You get to know _him,_ and you know what? He doesn’t count anymore. He doesn’t get to be me. Not after you changed him.”

“I made him better,” she murmured, trailing her fingers over his lips. Her other hand rested at her forehead, rubbing it slowly. “I helped him realise his full potential. His true potential. All of them. Divad was hardest to bring around. I know you know. But in the end -”

“In the end, you found some more powers and decided to use them to decimate entire populations. Was it worth it?”

She let out a breath through her nose, her eyes smiling pityingly, and tapped her index against his lips. He lashed out, snapping at it, but she had already pulled it away by the time his teeth closed. She held it out in front of him now, her gaze sharp. “That was your true destiny. I’m sorry if you don’t believe it, but you’ve got to.” Her hands come back to the sides of his face. This time, he held it in place. “I can help you now. Even if you came from your timeline.”

He searched her expression for malice, but all he could find was a strange desperation. It was sick - like Farouk actually _wanted_ to help him. He sucked in, gathered his saliva, and spit at her face. “Don’t touch me.”

Her expression twisted in disgust, and then fury, and the facade was broken. He had never seen Syd this angry before. “You’re a fool, David. You can’t see a good thing even when it stands right in front of you. That’s a shame.” She stepped back, and in a flash of light, Farouk was back, all spider now, save for his head and the very tops of his shoulders, that melted into the spider’s body. “You could have been beautiful, you know.”

“I’m more beautiful than _that,”_ David growled, nodding to Farouk’s body.

Farouk moved closer, until he was towering about him. “Beauty is subjective,” he said. “Real beauty is power.”

In David’s mind, Dvd scoffed. _Power. We’ll show him power._

_Together,_ Divad said back. Their minds stirred against David’s, brushing acceptance and understanding and energy into his thoughts. And they knew, together, that they could bust out of this web if they tried. They had all their training to lean on. That was all it took.

David shut his eyes. He pulled all his focus inward, toward the powers that lingered in his reach, while Divad and Dvd clambered for their own. He knew what to do. _They_ knew what to do. This was all the same as when he was training to fight Farouk, when he had to withstand the mental attacks that Cary’s machines had thrown at him. This was the same situation. He gathered as much energy as he could, until he could almost feel it vibrating in his mind, waited until the others had joined him, and threw it out, as hard and as fast as he could.

He heard the webs around him crackle. The pressure around his body let up, but he couldn’t feel it. With all his newfound strength, he could only feel the tickle across his skin as his powers trickled through and healed every tiny cut he had. A heat flared in his chest, then shot outward, into his limbs and up into his head and down into his stomach. It wasn’t an uncomfortable burn: rather, a lively coat of flames that coated everything inside of him. He could feel himself growing, expanding in the Astral Plane, his powers reaching to connect itself to the invisible anchors of the space: a liminal realisation.

Several voices spoke at once in his mind. More than Divad, more than Dvd. The same three words, from dozens of different voices, all at once: _We’re with you._

His form shimmered and quivered and morphed now into another bird-like entity - one that he had never been able to reach, until now. Now, when he opened his eyes, he was looking down a beak, with a long and feathery tail curling down from his body and ending in flames. Everything seemed open, seemed uncovered, seemed _exposed_ to his own mind.

Even Farouk himself, who, David noticed, had been knocked several yards away and was now regaining his right feet beneath him. He burned with a furious red mist that rolled off his body now in waves, like billowing smoke.

_“Qoqnoos,”_ he hissed. _Phoenix._

David let out a shrill cry, launching himself high into the air. Farouk shot up after him, twisting and growing in size, but David, intent on not letting him do anything of the sort, shot a ball of fire at him. His aim was off, and it went careening just past one of Farouk’s arms.

“You try too hard to understand on your own, David!” Farouk hissed. His voice sounded far off, but close by at the same time. “You can never be beautiful without me!” He sped past David, spinning a web around his side that cut into his feathers and his waist.

Bleeding fire through his feathers, David soared away from Farouk and into the astral sky, bleeding flames behind him. He could feel Farouk crawling after him, faster than any mortal creature could crawl, his powers threatening at the back of his head, but he kept one step ahead of him.

Then he misstepped.

Wanting to be rid of Farouk, he wheeled around, blasting him with a pointed psychic attack that he intended to shatter through everything Farouk was sending after him. But Farouk already seemed to have expected it: he deflected David and rushed forward, shooting a web at his neck that clung to his feathers instantly and bound him tightly, constricting his throat and strangling him. No matter how hard David struggled, no matter how much fire he bled from his neck, he couldn’t melt the webs.

In front of him, Farouk grinned viciously. “I fought your father before,” he taunted, stepping forward until he looked menacingly over him. “What makes you think you could ever be like him? So sure that your way is the right way, that you step onto my land and try to take me from it?”

_Your way is wrong._

“No way is _wrong,_ my dear. There are only those who do, and those who do not.” He reached out, placing the end of a leg between David’s eyes. “We simply chose to do.”

It hurt sharply and suddenly, like a knife stabbed deep into his head. He squeezed his eyes shut, yanking his head back, but it only made the webs tighten. His energy was waning and draining. If he didn’t do something quickly, it would be gone for good - and he would die. _Stop!_

“We’re sorry it must come to this.” Farouk’s touch slid across David’s forehead, sending more pain into his mind and forcing him to withdraw his powers, to shield them deep within his mind, where he couldn’t be touched. “But we have a better you, now. The real you. The one who is whole, with me. You are a fragment, a splinter, just like everyone else, without me.”

_No!_

Everyone in David’s mind - in _their_ mind - seemed to dissent to that, and it came over their body like a wave of terror. Farouk was the fragment. _Farouk_ was the splinter who had never belonged. He was the one who didn’t fit. He had never been a part of him. Not like Divad and Dvd were. He had learned to work with the two of them. They had never meant to steal his entire body and mind and soul from him. They had meant to protect him. That was what Cary had said: that they were created to protect him. A defence mechanism, just like his rational mind had been, when they were trapped in the darkness of their mind, in a coffin underground. They were here to help.

Syd and Clark and Cary hadn’t just saved him from Legion: they had saved him from himself. They had saved him from never understanding his own mind. They had saved him from falling into the same pattern as Legion had.

Dozens of voices laughed softly in his mind, behind his ears. _Now help yourself._

“Any last words?” Farouk asked. His voice sounded faint.

Just like that, David was connected. To everything on the outside, of course, but everything on the inside, too. He shifted himself back from his body, loosening control, and in an instant, his powers came loose, guided by the others as much as they were by him. They, she, he, all of them there, some strong and some yet unrecognised, seeping through the cracks to save the whole. No forced takeover, no pressing entities in his mind ready to erase him from existence.

_Go to hell, Farouk._

They pushed out all at once, with every bit of power they could muster: a dangerous poisoned bullet shooting at Farouk’s chest; a wink of light behind him that tore him back violently; a bolt of lighting that severed the web and ricocheted through it and into Farouk; a terrifying explosion of energy at the bottom of Farouk’s jaw; and a horizontal pillar of fire that consumed him. A shrill cry started up, like the scream of a kettle. Through the flames, they watched as the spider’s form twisted, changing back into Legion and Divad and Dvd all in the same second, and then Syd, and King, and someone David didn’t recognise, and another, and another. He would have been sad, if he didn’t know this was an illusion.

And then everything stopped, and there was silence, and darkness. No stars and no light, save the flames that poured down his shoulders and chest. He floated there for a long time, his eyes shut. He could feel the shift of the time impasse in his mind, like the cork of a bottle coming loose. The universe cascaded around him, running along his mind, tuning to his process thoughts, to the rhythm of his breathing.

When he opened his eyes, he was lying on his back on the floor of the amphitheater, the dilapidated ceiling and walls crumbling and toppling down around him. Above him, part of the ceiling tumbled straight toward him. Unable to find the mental energy to teleport, he rolled himself out from under it. The ground shook as the debris hit the ground beside him. Small pieces flew at and around him, and dust scattered around him, choking him at every breath.

Coughing, David covered his nose and hauled himself through a pile of rubble. He curled into himself, eyes watering, and stayed like that as the walls fell, leaving nothing but soot and sunlight streaming through the air.

As the air cleared, he could just make out a figure on the ground a few feet away, wearing familiar purple cloth with blue swirls.

Legion lay unmoving, his body smoking and blackened in scorch marks. Weakly, David reached out with his mind, feeling for any hint of activity. He found nothing. With a grunt, he moved himself to his side, reaching out and placing his hand on Legion’s chest.

Nothing. No heartbeat, and no movement.

Finally. _Finally._ The monster was dead, was no more. David had finally killed him, for the second time. Or, maybe, the third time, if this timeline’s desert counted.

He shut his eyes again. His throat felt raw, and his neck hurt, but he was here, alive. Maimed, exhausted, but alive, despite all odds. Despite his own doubt that he would ever be able to properly face Legion. Despite thinking he wasn’t ready. He _really_ hadn’t been ready to face Farouk… but he’d done it, and he had made it out alive.

Still breathing heavily, David looked over at Legion. His long, dark hair lay limp on the ground, dusted over with bits of scattered pebbles and ash. If he hadn’t seen it so alive before, David never would have believed that it had ever had the ability to defy gravity so gracefully. It just looked… dead. Just like the rest of him. Just like all of them.

_Was killing them the right thing to do?_

_Farouk deserved to die,_ they answered back. Not just Divad, not just Dvd: multiple voices at once, without shape or form, but strangely soothing. Through it, he could vaguely pick out Dvd and Divad.

_No, not that. I meant all of them. The rest of them. All the identities._

_Would it have been better if they had killed you?_

David shut his eyes again, resting his hands on his stomach. His chest hurt, and lifting his head without first rolling onto his side was out of the question, so he stayed down, as though pinned by an invisible weight. _No, obviously dying would have been bad._

But Legion had killed Farouk, back in his past, and that had set off this entire chain of events in the first place. Who was to say this would end up the same way?

_Remember what Syd said,_ they said. _You know things now. You know better. You know how we work together, and exactly where the others in our timeline go wrong. You won’t turn into him._

The air, stagnant now that the remains of the ruined amphitheatre had settled, was tight and uncomfortably thick in his nose. He slid an arm over his nose and mouth, breathing through the fabric of his shirt, and stayed for the next several minutes, his mind occupied, his thoughts sluggish. Fatigue most of all. Battling Legion and Farouk had drained him physically and mentally.

Abruptly, he felt something stir in his mind. A faint tap. At first, he thought it was one of the other people in his mind, but he knew the feeling of Divad and Dvd when they wanted attention or control, and they came as feelings. This tapping came from outside of him, somewhere invisible but real. He blinked his eyes open, glancing around and spreading his mind slowly around the theatre, and then faster, until it raced a mile out in every direction. Not a living soul responded. Nothing.

So he followed it himself, sending his mind out. Everything felt clearer and less murky: a product of the time travelling impasse breaking, he imagined. He felt a tug in his gut. The insides of his ears crackled, and through it came something that sounded like a voice, unclear and fragmented.

A pause. Then the voice came again, all around him, clear enough to get a word through now, but still piercing. “David!”

In the psychic haze, he frowned. “Who said that?”

Silence reigned for all of two seconds. Inside, he felt the tug become stronger, drawing his insides in all directions. It wasn’t painful - actually, it was quite dull - but it was unusual, as though the very dimensions of space were trying to pull him apart.

“David!” _Switch._ Her voice still sounded grainy and shrill, but he could recognise it now. “Hang on. I’ll get you out of there.”

Before he could respond, an invisible force wrapped itself around him, rooting him to the spot. He had no time to think, except that everything suddenly felt cold.

He hit the floor on his back, hard. The impact knocked the wind out of him. Around him were the long-familiar walls of the commune. A couch sat several feet away, a table by his feet. Switch knelt by his side, looking down at him worriedly, her dark hair hanging over her face. She still wore the same long-sleeved floral shirt as she had when they had decided to go to the future, red and green and purple and blue flowers on a navy blue background.

“I had _no_ idea that would happen,” she said, running a hand through her hair. She wasn’t wearing her headphones. “I didn’t think I’d lose you. I thought we’d go together, but then you slipped, and I tried to get you, and I was sent back here.” Her eyes swept over him, and she seemed to notice his clothes for the first time. “What happened to your clothes?”

David pressed a knuckle to his eye, sitting up slowly. “What does that mean?”

“You weren’t wearing that earlier.”

He lifted his brows and glanced at her. She looked confused, and truthfully. “Earlier? How long have I been gone?”

“Three hours.” She made a face. “I’ve been trying this whole time to find a way to reach you, and I finally did, just a minute ago. The door unlocked.”

Now, it was David’s turn to frown. “Wait - you said I’ve been gone for three hours? As in, it’s been three hours since we tried to go to the future?”

“Yeah.” Switch adjusted herself so that she could sit on her calves. “Why? How long has it been for you?”

That wasn’t right. Switch could manipulate _time._ Why didn’t she know how long he had been gone? “I don’t know. Months, at least. Almost a year.”

Her eyes widened. She leaned back and looked him over again, staring at his clothes. “A year? But… where have you been?”

“In the future, where you sent us. Or - where you _tried_ to send us. Except…” He thought back to what Future Syd had told him: Legion’s powers and the lock he had put up to ward away Switch from returning. “Legion did this thing to keep you out, but keep me in. Like a lock on one of your doors.”

“Yeah. I saw the metal padlock on the giant unmarked metal door in new the dark corner of the hallway and figured the other side led to wherever you were.”

He would have thought that a joke if she didn’t look completely serious. “Not my fault.”

She rolled her eyes. “Well? What did you see?”

He blinked, pinching the bridge of his nose and shutting his eyes. In the darkness, he thought of Syd and Cary and Clark, of their machines and their windows and their dark walls, of fallen buildings and abandoned cities, of Legion’s cruel smirk, of the old camp in India. In a way, he missed it all, but he knew he couldn’t mourn for something that didn’t exist in this timeline. He could only prevent it. “The end of the world. I met a few people. It’s a long story.” Too much to explain to her now. “There were a lot of things I didn’t expect to find there. But…”

She leaned to the side, watching him intently. “But?”

He shrugged a shoulder and looked at her, the corner of his lip curving into a lopsided grin. “I know what to do now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're reading this, then it's YOU SPECIFICALLY I'm here to thank for reading through this entire fic. As a writer, there's nothing better than knowing people read your stuff. So thank you, for reading this little journey. It spawned from a tiny idea and grew into a multi-chapter fic. LEGION has a funny way of doing that to us.


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